UBRA~ OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES 07 AMERICA. 



STUDIES 



OF THE 



OLD TESTAMENT, 



/ BY 

i 

AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D., 

PROFESSOR AT ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. 
AUTHOR OF "THE STILL HOUR," ETC. 



11 



( 






BOSTON : 
CONGREGATIONAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY, 

CONGREGATIONAL HOUSE, 

BEACON STREET. 

1879. 






\ 



Copyright, 1878, by 
CONGREGATIONAL PUBLISHING SOCIETY. 



STEREOTYPED BY 

C. J. PETERS & SON, 

73 Fedebal Street. 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE. 



These studies of the Old Testament were originally 
published in one of our most widely-circulated religious 
papers. So many persons have expressed a wish for 
them in a more permanent form, that they are now 
gathered into this volume. Slight changes have been 
made, — a change in the order of topics, an occasional 
enlargement or alteration of paragraphs, and a few 
corrections. If the volume serves to illustrate, in any 
degree, how ancient and neglected Scriptures may be 
revived in the popular interest, and thus to show the 
perpetuity of the Old Testament as a' living book for 
all ages, the object of this republication will be ac-^ 
complished. 

Theological Seminary, Andovek, Mass. 
Oct. 1, 1878. 



CONTENTS. 







PAGE 


-I. 


The Prophet of the Broken - Heart . 


7 


. n. 


God works with Minorities who are work- 






ing for Him 


21 


m. 


A Model of Prater in Emergencies . 


33 


IV. 


An Ancient Revival of Religion 


43 


,v. 


Christian Alliances with Wicked Men . 


55 


VI. 


Honoring God's House 


67 


VII. 


Presumption in the Worship of God 


79 


VIII. 


Fidelity to the Religion of a Godly Ances- 






try 


89 


IX. 


The Lost Son of a Godly Father 


100 


X. 


The Godly Son of an Ungodly Father . 


111 


XI. 


The Prodigal Son of Godly Parents 


124 


XII. 


The Twin Serpents . . • 


137 


XIII. 


Avowed Enemies of Religion . . - . 


147 


XIV. 


A Talk with Young People about Josiah 


161 


XV. 


An Ancient Model of Youthful Temperance. 


174 


XVI. 


The Lost Bible • . 


187 


XVII. 


Good Men who are not Churchmen . 


201 


XVHI. 


Intertwining of God's Plans with the Plans 






of Men 


215 


-XIX. 


The Kingdoms that die, and the Kingdom 






that lives 


230 


XX. 


Fruitless Convictions of Sin .... 

5 


244 



b CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

XXI. The Men in the Fire 261 

'XXII. The Man in the Lions' Den 277 

XXIII. The Fulfilment of Prophecy in the Career 

of Cyrus 295 

XXTV. Christ the Centre of Biblical Thought . . 314 



STUDIES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



THE PROPHET OF THE BROKEN HEART. 

Oil that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of 
tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the 
daughter of my people! — Jek. ix. 1. 

THE "Weeping Prophet" is the title often 
given to Jeremiah. He is not a popular 
prophet. Unhappy men are not commonly popu- 
lar men. Yet this one had ample reason for the 
depression under which he lived, and the minor 
key which runs through the strain of his writings. 
He was very far from being a morose man. He 
did not mourn over disappointed ambitions of his 
youth. He was not soured at the world's injustice. 
He wasted no melodrama over the "cold, cold 
world." He was the last man living to be a mis- 
anthrope. 

It may help us to appreciate two of the most 
affecting and sublime books of the Bible, to in- 
quire, What was it that made this very able and 
godly man so miserable ? Why should he, more 

7 



8 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

than other men, be given over to lifelong sorrow ? 
Why should he, more than other men, leave us a 
book of "Lamentations" as the most significant 
record of his life? Why should his name have 
coined a word, "jeremiad," expressive of the 
lugubrious and dismal in literature? 

The answer is this. He had a most delicately 
sensitive nature, a most profound attachment to 
the cause of God, an intense patriotic love of his 
native land ; yet it was his lot to live at an age 
when the people of God had fallen into most fear- 
ful apostasy, and the most terrific judgments were 
impending over them. It was given to him to see 
those judgments hurrying on apace. He heard 
angels of retribution on the wings of the wind. 
He saw their sabres flashing in the sun. 

Moreover, it was his mission to tell the people 
of their sins, to rebuke the nobles for their oppres- 
sion, the humbler orders for their vileness, the 
priesthood for their falseness, even his fellow- 
prophets for their infidelity to the living God. 
The whole nation, from prince to beggar, had 
reached the very bottom of national depravity; 
and this lone man was set to tell them of it, and 
to forewarn them of the frightful doom which was 
impending. He was the prophet of unwelcome 
truth. He had to face the facts of an age of 
retribution. He had to tear away the illusions 
with which people were deceiving themselves. 
They were bragging of the recovery of the Bible, 



THE PROPHET OF THE BROKEN HEART. 9 

which Josiah had found in the rubbish of their 
desecrated temple. ' They claimed that that sacred 
treasure was going to make all things right with 
them. They treated it much as an African savage 
regards the fetich which he worships, or the 
amulet which he wears around his neck. The 
possession of the Sacred Book, they thought, 
would save them. This young prophet knew 
better, and he had to tell them so. 

The recovered Bible had come too late to save 
them, just as Christianity now comes to some 
savage tribes too late to save them from extermi- 
nation. The people did not want to hear his 
story. He was a croaker. They wanted to hear 
somebody who would give them a pleasanter dis- 
course. People who are living in sin, and who 
know it, are sometimes very fond of "beautiful 
sermons." They will bear any thing better than 
the simple truth. Beauty is more popular than 
truth. 

Besides, this unpopular preacher stood alone. 
Not another one of the prophetic order stood by 
him. The only friend he had was one Baruch, an 
obscure scribe ; and even he got sadly frightened 
at the plain talk of his outspoken friend. The 
priests, too, hated him as a renegade. All classes 
— some for one reason, and some for another — 
agreed in their spite against this solitary truth- 
teller. Like Bunyan and many another unpala- 
table preacher, he got himself into prison for his 



10 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

fidelity. For forty years it was his business to 
deliver his warnings and rebukes and threaten- 
ings, word for word, as God bade him, to nobles 
and priests and people who were bent on destruc- 
tion, and determined not to be saved by God or 
man. 

To him belongs the distinction of first suffering 
the burning of the word of God by the enraged 
king who would not listen to his reproofs. Many 
times after his day, faithful preachers and reform- 
ers saw the Bible burned in the market-place by 
royal and papal decree. But the first in the long 
line of such honored men was this despondent 
prophet of Judsea. On him Satan first wreaked 
that form of impotent revenge. As if a truth 
could be burned with a flaming scroll ! 

A singular fact also is it, that this solitary 
preacher, the butt of a nation's ridicule, does not 
seem to have been made for such work. Usually 
God fits the man to his life's work. If he is to 
have stern work to do, he is made of stern stuff. 
Luther, with much that was lovable in his nature, 
was, on the whole, a rough, stout man. That 
square face and thick neck, and those compact 
lips of his, indicate a man of will, who could bear 
rougher handling than other men. He was to 
contend with devils ; and God gave him a nature 
which devils feared. Nobody ever called Luther 
the " weeping prophet." If he shed tears, it was 
on his knees before God only. He shed no tears 



THE PEOPHET OF THE BROKEN HEAET. 11 

before the Diet of Worms. He was in no lachry- 
mose mood when he had the pope's bull to deal 
with, outside the Elster Gate of Wittenberg. 

The mourning prophet of Juclsea does not seem 
to have been of that stern make. He had a deli- 
cate and retiring nature. Gentle and unselfish 
was he, like a loving woman. When the sombre 
truth first dawns upon his early manhood, and he 
sees the work he has to do, he breaks out with the 
despairing cry, "Ah, Lord! I cannot speak! I 
am but a child ! " So overwhelmed is he by the 
sight of his country's shame, and the foresight of 
her doom, that he exclaims, " Oh that my head 
were waters, that I might weep day and night for 
the daughter of my people ! " His writings show, 
by their chosen imagery, that he longs for solitude. 
He hungers to get away from the sins and sorrows 
of his time. Cowper's refrain, " Oh for a lodge in 
some vast wilderness ! " would have expressed the 
habit of his mind. He "sits alone, and keeps 
silence, crouching under his burden." We seem 
to hear him crying out in the bitterness of his 
spirit, — 

" The time is out of joint. Oh, cursed spite, 
That ever I was born to set it right ! " 

It is very significant of the despair of his soul, 
that he lives a celibate life. It is not for such a 
man as he to seek the dear delights of family and 
companionships of home. His great life's work is 



12 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

too sad, too heart-breaking. He will not venture 
to lay the half of it on the heart of any woman. 
At times, when the solitude of it, and the black- 
ness of it, and the funeral dirge of it, become 
intolerable, he heaps curses on the day of his 
birth. True to his Oriental instincts, he curses 
the very messenger who bore the glad news to his 
father that a boy was born to bear his name. Yes, 
he is the Prophet of the Broken Heart. The sins 
of his people are a lifelong grief to him. His 
own work, as their spiritual teacher, overwhelms 
him. The mystery of his life is, why he, of all 
men living, should have been called to such a 
mission, among such a people, on the eve of their 
destruction, too late to do them any good ; when 
all that he can do is to proclaim to them the judg- 
ments with which they are soon to be overtaken. 

When the late Rev. Charles Kingsley was in his 
last sickness, and very near his end, though he did 
not know it, but was waiting in anguish for the 
daily expected death of his wife, he said one day, 
as his biographer tells us, " It must be right ; for 
it is so strange and yet so painful." The very 
mysteriousness of inexplicable trial is a token of 
the divine wisdom from which it comes. No other 
mind could contrive trial so profound. It must 
come from God, and " must be right." Such was 
the forlorn consolation of the stricken prophet, 
when overwhelmed, as he often was, by the lot 
which it had pleased God to send him. Even 



THE PROPHET OF THE BROKEN HEART. 13 

God's veracity he questions : " O Lord, thou hast 
deceived me, and I was deceived." Imprecations 
flow from his lips like household words. 

To his own times and people he was the prophet 
of doom. So far as they were concerned, his work 
ended there. Not so in the fore-reaching design of 
God. Jeremiah " builded better than he knew." 
He did an unconscious work for coming ages. 
Imperfect man as he was, he was the forerunner 
of the spiritual disclosures of the new dispensa- 
tion. The old dispensation was near its end. Its 
sun was going down in blood-red clouds. But the 
spiritual meaning of the ancient forms and rites 
was coming slowly to the light. To no other 
prophet of the olden time, unless it be Isaiah, do 
we turn for glimpses of it as we do to this despair- 
ing one. The very burden of his soul pressed it 
out of him. He was driven to fall back upon the 
spiritual truths and consolations which his own 
soul needed. His very sins made them a necessity 
to him. Nothing else could save him from mania 
or suicide. God thus used him, his sorrows, his 
self-conflicts, his errors, his sins. 

Let us pass rapidly over a few suggestions drawn 
from this sketch of this remarkable man : — 

1. Jeremiah represents a class of good men and 
women of whom some exist in every age. There 
are some good men of whom it must be conceded 
that they are not gay Christians. From their 
make, and from the disclosures of truth which 



14 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

God gives them, they cannot be. They have a 
peculiarly sensitive and deep nature. They have 
profound intuitions. Their religion is proportion- 
ately deep and tender. In all this world's history, 
nothing else is so Startling a fact to them as that 
this is a lost world, estranged from God, on its 
way, but for God's loving grace, to an eternal and 
awful doom. 

These men and women are often blamed for 
being gloomy. In their hearts they answer, " How 
can we be hilarious wh^n the imperilled souls of 
men, and our own too, lest as a burden upon us ? " 
If the world were enveloped in one vast conflagra- 
tion, should we naturally laugh and sing and dance 
our way through it? Yet a more fearful flame is 
ravaging it than that of the fires of Etna. A cer- 
tain sobriety of deportment seems to such men 
becoming to life in such a world as this, and with 
such a future crowding on its destiny. 

Christian ministers, whose ■ work compels them 
to think much of these things, are apt to be so 
oppressed by them as to acquire a certain gravity 
of demeanor which the world laughs at. If you 
could look into their hearts, as you sometimes do 
in their memoirs, you would see that they bear the 
burden day and night of this lost world. 

2. Christians of the broken heart, it must be 
confessed, are not apt to be popular with the world. 
Very hard things are said of them. Very unjust 
judgments they have to bear in silence. The world 



THE PROPHET OF THE BROKEN HEART. 15 

cracks many a jest upon their long faces and their 
" vinegar " aspect. I have seen tears trembling in 
their eyes, as their only answer to the gibes of 
men for whose souls they went home to pray. 

Yet have not you heard from such jesters the 
fling at our common faith, "If I believed what 
you believe, I should move heaven and earth to 
save souls : it seems to me I could never laugh 
again " ? So said an estimable woman of the 
world to me last summer. It is hard to please 
men who do not feel the inner life which many 
humble Christians lead. Which shall we do, gen- 
tlemen and ladies, which shall we do ? — hold on 
to, and try to act upon, the faith that gives us 
"long faces," or meet your charge of heartless 
inconsistency by living as if this were already a 
saved world, and our home were Eden ? 

3. The class of godly men and women of whom 
Jeremiah is the type possess a very profound style 
of Christian character. Not perfect, by any means. 
We all have an ideal of a certain robust and 
rounded Christian life superior to theirs. On the 
whole, St. Paul was a nobler character than Jere- 
miah. He ought to have been. He saw at its 
meridian the sun which the prophet only foresaw 
long before the dawn. Yet it is unjust not to give 
the Jeremiahs of our brotherhood the credit for 
ploughing deep in their sense of eternal things. 
They may not be as happy as their faith in Christ 
warrants them to be. Yet they do make a begin- 



16 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

ning in the right direction. Theirs is a struggle 
to be and to do, of which they have no reason to 
be ashamed. They do not cover their eyes. They 
accept God's teachings courageously. Eternity 
will show to us all, that some of the world's 
great souls are among them. Multitudes who were 
more popular with their fellow-men here will there 
stand aside, and leave a clear space for those 
mourning ones to go up and hear God's message 
to them. Does anybody doubt what that will be ? 
4. Such Christians as the "weeping prophet" 
represents are men and women of great spiritual 
power. The world does not like them, but cannot 
help respecting them. " I keep clear of unhappy 
people," said one of the impatient ones : yet I 
observed that he chose for his pastor, and honored 
as a great man, one whose face was long, and 
whose look betokened secret tears. We love 
realities, after all. We feel the power of the man 
who knows the most of them, and feels them most 
profoundly. The man or woman who takes God's 
views of things, interprets human life as God in- 
terprets it, looks out on eternity as God reveals 
it, and whose visage bears the marks of inward 
struggles of soul with the facts of human destiny 
as God declares them, is a power with us all. If 
we come into deep waters, and the billows go over 
our heads, we look around gasping for the friendly 
word or look or hand of such to cheer us. The 
very men we have laughed at, or shrunk from, 



THE PROPHET OF THE BROKEN HEART. 17 

because they were " unco' guid men," are those 
whose experience we want then. 

Said one man of the world, whose misfortune it 
was to have a " gay parson " for his pastor, " Our 
pastor is a capital fellow, a born wit, a splendid 
mimic ; he keeps the table in a roar ; and in the 
pulpit he is not afraid to make us laugh." Said 
his friend, " Suppose that you had lost your only 
child, or that you were yourself about to die." 
— " Well," was the reply, " to tell you the truth, 
he is the last man I should want to see then. Still 
he is a capital fellow." 

Somehow the " capital fellows," in the ministry 
or out of it, are a little limited in their range of 
usefulness. They do for picnics or the croquet- 
ground. When we come to those passages of life 
or death at which eternity looks in upon us, we 
turn to men and women of another make. 

5. Who can help seeing that broken-hearted 
Christians are in some respects very nearly akin to 
the Lord Jesus Christ f 

Does not their life, dropping its inconsistencies, 
strike us very much as his life does ? He did not 
live a very hilarious life. Jests are not the chief 
thing we remember from his lips. His biographers 
do not say much of his " eyes sparkling with fun," 
and his " ringing laugh." He was never called a 
"capital fellow." Such clergymen as Matthew 
Byles and Sydney Smith, somehow, do not remind 
us very impressively of him. He attended a wed- 



18 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

ding ; but the chief thing he did there had more to 
do with eternity than with time, more to do with 
God than with man. Comic songs — But stop ! 
Let us take off our shoes from our feet, for the 
ground whereon we stand is holy ! 

The sorrows of men had a strange attraction for 
him. He did not " keep clear of unhappy men." 
The grave of Lazarus was the scene of one of the 
events most strikingly like him. The way he felt 
about Jerusalem seems very much like that of the 
weeping prophet. The nights he spent in prayer 
are a great comfort to these Christians of the 
broken heart. Of Gethsemane and Calvary what 
shall we say ? May we reverently ask what class 
of Christians most nearly resemble him there? 
What kind of disciples did he long to see around 
him then ? What is the meaning of that prophetic 
portrait of him which painters have never copied, 
" His visage was marred more than any man, and 
his form more than the sons of men " ? 

6. Let us not be misunderstood. It is not that 
the example even of the " Man of Sorrows " for- 
bids mirth, the laugh, the song, the jest. No: 
there is a time to laugh, and a time to dance. Re- 
joice, O young man, in thy youth, and let thy 
heart cheer thee ! Christ never by one word or 
look enjoined ascetic virtues. He lived so that 
bad men called him a glutton. Men who prayed in 
the streets with one eye open called him a wine- 
bibber. Men who cheated widows said he was a 



THE PKOPHET OF THE BROKEN HEART. 19 

sabbath-breaker. Adulterers charged him with 
unseemly acquaintance with outcast women. 
Murderers and blasphemers called him the devil. 
He was no saint according to the standard of such 
men. Nevertheless, the whole drift of his teach- 
ings and his life was towards a different kind of 
life from that which men call pleasure. Its joys 
lie deeper, and are built upon certain august and 
stern realities. And those realities it is which 
these Christians of the downcast eye are struggling 
with, some of them, day by day, all their lives 
long. 

We do them a very mean injustice if we fail to 
give them credit for this. They are simply strug- 
gling, like drowning men, as for dear life, to be 
true to the faith they hold. With heavy hearts 
and swollen eyes, they are trying to live their faith. 
They are agonizing to get near to Christ, and to 
live there. Drowning men do not sing many 
comic songs. Ye cynical critics, think what you 
may of the rest of us : there are such men and 
women as these, of whom Christ is not ashamed. 
Oh, what poor fools we are if we profane their 
conflicts with a gibe ! 

7. These Christians of the broken heart are sure 
of a very exalted rank in heaven. I hear a voice 
from beyond the stars, saying, "Blessed are they 
that mourn, for they shall be comforted. Blessed 
are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, 
for they shall be filled. What are these that are 



20 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

arrayed in white robes? Whence came they? 
These are they that came out of great tribulation : 
therefore are they before the throne of God, and 
serve him day and night in his temple. They 
shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more: 
and God shall wipe away all tears from their 
eyes." 



GOD WORKS WITH MINORITIES WHO ARE 
WORKING FOR HIM. 

Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multi- 
tude; for the battle is not yours, but God's. ... Ye shall not 
need to fight: . . . stand ye still, and see the salvation of the 
Lord: . . . fear not, the Lord will be with you. — 2 Chron. xx. 
15, 17. 

AT the darkest hour of our civil war, when 
the life of the country seemed trembling in 
the balance, the Government proclaimed a fast. 
The people gathered in immense numbers in the 
churches. Men not often seen there were found 
there on that day. An eminent civilian in one of 
our Atlantic cities, who seldom sought God's 
house on the Lord's Day, was observed on that 
fast day kneeling devoutly with God's people. 
When inquired of what brought Mm out to such 
services, he replied, " I thought it was high time 
to get help somewhere. We are in a tight place, 
and we need it." 

Men often seek God in " a tight place," when 
they think little of him in other places. It is 
marvellous how reasonable and proper grayer seems 
to them in such emergencies. 

Such was the condition of the Judsean kingdom 

21 



22 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

at the time of which our text speaks. A fast had 
just beeu observed ; the entire people had come 
together to obtain help of God " in a tight place." 
He gave them their desire, as he commonly does 
when men in trouble turn to him for relief. And 
in giving it he announced one of the great princi- 
ples of his working in the affairs of his kingdom : 
he works with minorities who are working for him. 
"Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this 
great multitude ; for the battle is not yours, but 
God's." Go out against them. The Lord will be 
with you. 

1. The history of the Church is full of illustra- 
tions of this law of divine procedure. Dip into it 
anywhere, and you come upon this divine strat- 
egy. Napoleon thought that he knew the world 
well. He had studied the history of great empires ; 
but he said it was an inexplicable mystery to him, 
that Christianity, beginning as it did with a few 
fishermen of the feeblest nation then on the globe, 
should in his time have risen to be so much more 
mighty than his own conquests, which had almost 
all the armies of Europe to back them. 

" Oh ! where are kings and empires now, 
Of old that went and came ? 
But, Lord, thy Church is praying yet, 
A thousand years the same." 

It was God's way of working with minorities 
who are working for him. When the Church be- 



GOD WORKS WITH MINORITIES. 23 

came corrupt, and needed reform, the same thing 
was repeated. A few earnest men, who were 
hunted like wild beasts, in a few years shook the 
world. The battle was not theirs, but God's. 

An old saying of the German reformers, which 
a modern reformer has untruthfully claimed as 
his own, was, " One, with God on his side, is a 
majority." " The battle is not yours, but God's." 
This fragment of our lesson was the favorite text 
of Sir Fowell Buxton. He once wrote to his 
daughter that she would find his Bible opening of 
itself to the place where this passage occurs. This 
text it was which gave him courage to move in the 
British Parliament for the emancipation of slaves 
throughout the British Empire. When he entered 
on that conflict, he stood almost alone ; when his 
bill was first read in Parliament, it was received 
with shouts of derisive laughter. But he be- 
thought him of this text, and began his speech 
saying, "Mr. Speaker, the reading of this bill is 
the. beginning of a movement which will surely 
end in the abolition of slavery throughout the 
British dominions." The old Hebrew prophet 
never said a truer word. Sir Fowell knew it ; for 
the battle was not his, but God's. 

The same phenomenon was witnessed in the first 
attempt to establish American missions among the 
heathen. When one of the early meetings of the 
American Board was held at Bradford, Mass., less 
than twenty persons were in attendance ; and they 



24 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

were hooted at by boys on the piazza of the hotel 
where they were in session. Barely sixty-five 
years have passed ; and at the last meeting of that 
Board, in Providence, five thousand strangers from 
abroad were present, and two churches were filled 
with eager friends. 

When the first American missionaries reached 
India, the English Government refused them a 
landing. " Go back," was the imperious order : 
" go back in the ship in which you came." In the 
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, 
when it was first proposed to send the gospel to 
the heathen, reverend clergymen declared against 
the fanatical scheme. They said that " the heath- 
en were a contented and happy people, and that 
it was no business of Scottish Christians to disturb 
them." And this in face of our Lord's express 
command, " Go ye into all the world, and preach 
the gospel to every creature." Not a century has 
passed since that time : yet now all Christendom 
rings with gratulation over the achievement of 
Christian missions ; and no other class of men are 
so reverently canonized in the affections of the 
Church as her missionaries to the heathen world. 
This is the fruit of God's working with minorities 
who are working for him. 

So uniform has been this method of divine pro- 
cedure, that we may safely say that great progress 
of any good cause is seldom if ever secured in any 
other way. When a good cause becomes popular, 



GOD WORKS WITH MINORITIES. 25 

and majorities swing over to its support, the work 
is substantially done. Probably some new cause 
is then coming to the birth underneath. Every 
cause which God originates starts with only Gid 
eon's three hundred. 

2. From this law of God's working, it is clear 
that in spiritual affairs the balance of power does 
not depend on numbers. Votes have very little to 
do with it. It depends on spiritual forces. It 
depends on insight into the spiritual wants of 
the world ; on consecration to God's service ; on 
the power of prayer ; on spiritual discovery of the 
side on which God is ; and specially on intensity 
of Christian character. 

The few who start a great movement towards 
the world's conversion, and who become its heroes 
because God has chosen them, are always intense 
men. They see things vividly. They have great 
visions. They feel profoundly. Their souls are 
aflame with holy ardor. " His ministers are a 
flaming fire." Yet they are men of sustained en- 
thusiasm. The fire does not crackle and blaze out 
quickly : it burns like kindled anthracite. In the 
best sense they are men of one idea, — a vast idea, 
in which a thousand common ones are centred, 
yet one to which whole souls can be reasonably 
devoted. So far as this world is concerned, God 
is possessed of one idea. 

Such men are always a power in the world. 
The world cannot help it, and they cannot help it. 



26 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Such men are one of God's powers, imperial in 
authority, and destined to conquest. In due time 
numbers will swell around them. Meanwhile it 
is of very little account how many or how few 
they are at the outset. 

" A little flock: so calls He thee 

Who bought thee with his blood ; 
A little flock, disowned of men, 
But owned and loved of God." 

3. It is a great thought on this subject, that the 
human race furnishes but a small part of the holy 
ministries of this world. The ministry of angels 
probably swells what we call minorities to secret 
majorities. " Are they not all ministering spirits ? " 
Invisible multitudes probably fill the air with their 
busy pinions in service to the right. We are sur- 
rounded with a great cloud of witnesses. When 
conflicts deepen on the earth, for and against the 
cause of Christ, other worlds send hosts of eager 
combatants to the fray. Probably no child of God 
is ever left without these unseen auxiliaries. " He 
shall give his angels charge over thee." Earthly 
monarchs often form secret treaties of alliance, 
offensive and defensive, by which each pledges 
the whole force of his kingdom to the support of 
the other. Let us have faith to see the unseen, 
and it may often help our wavering courage to 
remember that countless myriads are in secret 
alliance with us. 



GOD WORKS WITH MINORITIES. 27 

One of England's great poets says of a noted 
champion of liberty, — 

" Thou hast left behind 
Powers that will work for thee ; air, earth, and skies : 
There's not a breathing of the common wind 
That will forget thee. Thou hast great allies. 
. . . Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave." 

But the friend of Christ has allies more imperial 
than skies and winds and waters. Principalities in 
heavenly places, beings some of whom probably 
sway at their will the powers of nature, are his 
allies. 

4. Success in spiritual affairs often loses the char- 
acter of a conflict, so overwhelming and so easy is 
the working of divine auxiliaries. Thus ran the 
good cheer to the outnumbered men of Judah: 
" Ye shall not need to fight in this battle : stand 
ye still, and see the salvation of the Lord with 
you." God's help often comes in immense waves 
of spiritual re-enforcements. Our small calcula- 
tions and petty fears are overborne. We are lifted 
up, and carried over the obstacles which daunted 
us. We can no longer find the perils which 
alarmed us. This comes about with such ease and 
stillness that we lose the sense of struggle and of 
combat. 

Revivals of religion often take on this look. 
The more powerful and pure they are, the more 
still and godlike. At such periods sanguine be- 



28 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

lie vers are apt to think the age of conflict for the 
Church is over, and the latter days of peace and 
tranquil progress are dawning. In the great 
awakenings in New England, under the preaching 
of the Rev. Drs. Lyman Beecher and Nettleton, it 
was a favorite theme of gratulation to them, that 
probably the closing age of this world's pilgrimage 
was near at hand, and the golden visions of Isaiah 
were about to be realized. They seemed to them- 
selves to stand still, and see the salvation of the 
Lord. 

5. Minorities of honest and earnest men, devoted 
to a great cause, should never he opposed heedlessly. 
If it is God's method to begin great changes for 
good by putting into the hearts of a few men 
great ideas and great enterprises and great expec- 
tation, we need to be cautious how we treat men 
who may be spiritual pioneers. It is the way of 
the world to frown them down. They are branded 
with scornful nicknames. Fanatics, madmen, 
fools, men call them. " The crazy tinker " was 
the title by which the world labelled and libelled 
the author of the " Pilgrim's Progress." " Method- 
ists," " Puritans," " Quakers," — all nicknames at 
first. Not so will the wise and candid treat such 
men. 

Fanaticism may always be detected by its affinity 
with malign passions. Religious earnestness is not 
fanaticism. Novelty in religious thought and 
theory of life is not presumptively visionary. 



GOD WORKS WITH MINORITIES. 29 

That men turn the world upside down, is no proof 
that they are madmen. St. Paul did that. When 
men are obviously moved by profound convictions, 
and are in dead earnest in proclaiming them, if 
they are honest, candid, prayerful, unselfish men, 
and do not contradict either the word of God or 
the common sense of men, they deserve a hearing. 
They may be heralds of a new era of Christian 
progress. Their ideas may be from God. The 
power which moves them may be the power of God. 
Their self-confidence may be a divine assurance, 
prophetic of the future. " The homely beauty of 
the good old cause " may be about to spring into 
new life and glory in their hands. 

Take care that you do not recklessly denounce 
and deride such meu, lest you should denounce 
and deride God. It is like God to raise up such 
men, and inspire them, and send them to his peo- 
ple, as he sent the old prophets. A docile "spirit 
will welcome God's teaching, come in what form 
it may. God usually sends in forms which men 
have not expected. The true attitude of a Chris- 
tian thinker and worker toward such phenomena 
is one of vigilance and candor. Wisdom did not 
die with our fathers ; neither will it die with us. 
Old men will not carry it out of the world with 
them. New truth must be expected from new 
men. The world has yet to see a great many John 
the Baptists, voices in the wilderness, forerunners 
of great eras. 



30 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Let us, then, be on the lookout for such men. 
Let us greet them with a God-speed when they 
make their divine credentials clear. Let us keep 
our tastes in abeyance to our convictions. We love 
what we are used to. We revere the ancient. 
We all have roots in the venerable past. This is 
well. Yet the grandest arena of God's working is 
the future. A Christian's treasure should be there. 
Ours is a religion of hope, of expectation, of on- 
iooking to golden ages yet to come. Blessed were 
those Jews in our Lord's time who stood waiting 
for his coming, ready to receive him with open 
hearts. Blessed, too, are the foreseeing men and 
women of all ages, who are always watching for 
the morning ; praying for great things ; working 
for great things ; expecting great things ; bending 
forward, and listening for the prophetic voices; 
quick to see the great light in the heavens, when 
it first gilds the tops of the eastern hills. 

6. Within the Church of Christ itself is to be 
found a minority of believers whom Grod regards with 
peculiar complacency. An eminent clergyman of 
Philadelphia once expressed the opinion that a 
majority of the professed followers of Christ do 
not add any appreciable strength to the spiritual 
power of the Church. It saddens one to think 
that this may be true. Be it true or not, the fact 
cannot be doubted that there is within the Church 
a body of believers of peculiar spirituality of char- 
acter and consistency of life, who are generally a 
minority. 



GOD WORKS WITH MINORITIES. 31 

There is a church within the Church. St. John 
in his vision of the future declares, " Blessed and 
holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection. 
They shall be kings and priests unto God, and 
shall reign with him a thousand years." Whatevei 
that may mean, it implies gradation in the spiritual 
rank of the redeemed. This tallies with what we 
see in the Church on earth. There are Christians 
who always live near to God. They are obviously 
bent on living as Christ lived. They live as if 
they belonged to God. Their property they treat 
as his, not their own. They are always ready for 
Christian work. A revival of religion never takes 
them by surprise. They live in a revival perpetu- 
ally. They are men and women of much prayer. 
Pastors depend upon them in emergencies, as they 
cannot upon all professed believers. We always 
know where to find them, and never find them 
in the wrong place, on the wrong side, saying 
the wrong word, doing the wrong thing. 

Theirs is not a religion of form, not a religion 
of intermittent and erratic feeling, not a religion 
of aesthetic taste, but a religion of deep and con- 
trolling principle. As a spiritual power, they are 
the vanguard of the Church. They are the spir- 
itual aristocracy of Christ's kingdom. These are 
they who shall sit on his right hand and on his left 
without asking for the dignity. Princes are they in 
prayer, conquerors in conflict with the powers of 
evil, saints to whom the truculent criticism of the 
world even does not refuse the title. 



32 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Almost every large church contains a group of 
such Christians, few or more, yet commonly a 
minority. Sometimes they can be numbered on 
one's fingers. "I have one man in my church," 
said an aged pastor not long ago, — "I have one 
man on whom I can always depend. I do not 
know that I have another." It is a legitimate ob- 
ject of prayer and Christian aspiration, to be num- 
bered among those chosen few. God looks upon 
them with complacent joy. Christ sees in them of 
the travail of his soul. They satisfy him. Like 
David, they are men after God's own heart. Like 
John, they are beloved disciples. Like Mary, they 
have chosen the good part. Like Paul, they fight 
a good fight. Their very presence in the world, 
the world feels as a power on the side of right. 
Every good cause feels the loss of them when they 
die. As we stand beside their open graves, we 
thank God anew for the doctrine of immortality. 
One star diflereth from another star in glory. So 
also is the resurrection of the dead. 



A MODEL OF PRAYER IN EMERGENCIES. 

And Asa cried unto the Lord his God, and said, Lord, it is 
nothing with thee to help, whether with many, or with them 
that have no power: help us, O Lord our God; for we rest on 
thee, and in thy name we go against this multitude. O Lord, 
thou art our God; let not man prevail against thee. — 2 Chkojst. 
xiv. 11. 

THE prayers recorded in the Bible are almost 
all of them models in their place. Such is 
the prayer of the Jewish monarch in the text. 

King Asa is in a great strait. To all human 
appearance, his throne and his life are in peril. 
His Ethiopian enemy is in battle array before 
him, with numbers in the proportion to his own 
of about two to one. His defeat is morally cer- 
tain. He and his staff must have felt, in that 
valley of Ephratah, as they looked over the 
roods of glittering spears, as our own Washington 
felt in Valley Forge, in the most dismal winter of 
the Revolution. He seems to himself to have 
come to the place of extreme catastrophe. He 
he can only lie down and die. 

Like the " Father of his Country," the Jewish 
king betakes himself to prayer. It is about all 
there is left for him to do, preliminary to the fatal 



34 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

morrow. His petition is very brief. In great 
emergencies our wants are summed up in few 
words. We have no heart for 'more. This is the 
model of prayer in an emergency. It is made up of 
four fragments, each of which teaches us a funda- 
mental element in the spirit of prayer in such an 
exigency. 

1. Prayer in emergencies should be founded on a 
strong faith in GrooVs independence of human 
resources and methods of judgment. Hear the 
stricken monarch, as he kneels beneath the 
weight of a kingdom: "Lord, it is nothing to 
thee to help, whether with many or with them 
that have no power." This goes to the heart of 
the case. Nothing else equals the situation. 
"True," we seem to hear him plucking up his 
own courage in the extremity, — " true, I am out- 
numbered. Every man of us must engage two 
to-morrow. The best military science of the age 
is pitted against us. These Ethiopian invaders 
are no mean folk. They are stalwart men, led by 
able generals, flushed with victories. They are 
doubtless laughing at our temerity, and glorying 
in our coming shame. And by all human calcu- 
lations they are right. They are sure to win: 
we are doomed to fail. The laws of war bid us 
make the best terms of peace we can. Now is the 
time for a masterly retreat. But — No: not 
so, not so ! What are numbers to the God of 
Judah ? What are military tactics, and captains 



A MODEL OF PRAYER IN EMERGENCIES. 35 

of renown, and the pomp of conquest, — what 
are they all to the God of Israel ? A small mat- 
ter, — a very small matter. I remind me of the 
Red Sea. Our God is the living God. He made 
the heavens and the earth. The nations are as a 
drop in a bucket. He taketh up the islands as a 
very little thing. Yes, Lord, it is nothing to thee 
to help us in this emergency. It is like thee to give 
the battle to the weak. It is like thee to over- 
throw the many by the few." 

Military history, in every age, is not destitute 
of similar occurrences. There have been Chris- 
tian generals, who, to the world's eye, have 
seemed to have mysterious successes. They who 
watched the career of Gen. Havelock in India 
observed this feature in his history. His supe- 
riors used to put him upon service, to which they 
dared not send other men. They said that he 
often succeeded, where, by the laws of war, he 
ought not to succeed. Whether due to his habits 
of prayer, or not, there was the fact. 

In our own civil war, on one occasion, the gen- 
eral in command of certain forces broke out with 
the exclamation, on the eve of battle, "We have 
got them now, and they know it. God Almighty 
cannot save them." So he had "got them," by 
all human reckoning of the chances. His staff 
responded, " Yes, we are sure of them." But 
it happened, — how much it had to do with the 
fortunes of the day, we will not presume to say, 



36 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

but it happened, — that the commander-in-chief 
on the other side was a praying man. He had 
that morning spent an hour in his tent, invoking 
divine interposition in the coming conflict. The 
close of the day found him again in his tent offer- 
ing thanksgiving for a victory, while the presump- 
tuous general who thought that " God Almighty 
could not defeat him " was in ignominious flight 
down the valley of the Shenandoah. 

Why should it not be so ? Such men command 
invisible allies. They invoke the onset of spirit- 
ual battalions. They lead their enemies into am- 
buscades of angelic legions. If our eyes were not 
holclen, we might see that the very air is full of 
them. 

Are there not, in the lives of us all, emergencies 
in which our deliverance may depend on our real- 
izing to our faith the principle that God is in- 
dependent of the resources which decide human 
judgment ? In certain extreme hours, very much 
may depend on the depth of our faith in this. 
Our own courage may depend on it. Our power 
to energize others may depend on it. Our power 
with God may depend on it. We need to feel 
that prayer may command improbable results, 
because it commands supernatural resources. 

Much is gained also when we appreciate the 
ease with which God achieves marvellous issues 
in response to prayer. " A God doing wonders " 
is one of his significant titles, — significant of the 



A MODEL OF PRAYER IN EMERGENCIES. 37 

usage of his dominion. To him there are no such 
things as emergencies. Prayer never finds him 
overwhelmed by surprises. 

" To thee there's nothing old appears, — 
Great God, there's nothing new." 

The magnitude of our requests never startles 
his composure. In his serene life, there are no 
extreme hours, no critical junctures, no unforeseen 
contingencies. He is never conscious of an hour 
when his resources run low, when his powers are 
put to the strain, when he is weary and would 
pause to rest. The affairs of the universe are 
never a burden to him. 

Note the biblical way of describing the acts of 
God: "He spake, and it was done. He command- 
ed, and it stood fast. God said, Let there be light, 
and there was light." The serenity of the stars 
characterizes all his working. So calmly, so easi- 
ly, with such assurance of reserved forces and 
unused energies, does he perform, in answer to 
prayer, achievements which overwhelm our puny 
thought by their magnitude. Armies in the shock 
of battle he sways as easily as the breathing of an 
infant. 

A few years ago there appeared in our skies 
the most brilliant comet of the century. It was 
six millions of miles distant from our globe. Such 
was the speed of its' movement, that, if it had been 
aimed hither in its march, it would have come 



38 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

crashing upon us in less than two days, with the 
rnomentum of a hundred and fifty thousand miles 
an hour. Yet God held that blazing meteor in its 
appointed groove, worn by millions of years of 
travel, so that it glided gently across our world's 
orbit with motion imperceptible. It had the still- 
ness of a painting. Our infant children looked 
out upon it, and bade it good-night, as a beautiful 
plaything in the sky, without so much as the clos- 
ing of an eyelid at the eternal rush of its progress. 
So calm, so facile, so beautifully silent, are God's 
wonder-workings in answer to prayer. Mysteries 
so vast and so anomalous that astonished angels 
desire to look into them, occur with the ease of a 
summer twilight. 

We need to believe this. With all our hearts 
we need to accept it as the natural way of God's 
procedure. We need to be uplifted on the wings 
of faith to the divine plane of things in our emer- 
gencies. Then we can look down upon them as 
aeronauts above the clouds look down upon thun- 
der-storms and tornadoes, from a region of unut- 
terable stillness and under an unclouded sun. 

2. The example before us suggests, as a second 
element in believing prayer in emergencies, a pro- 
found sense of the inadequacy of all other sources of 
relief but Crod. We need to feel that we are shut 
in to God, and God only. " Help us, O Lord our 
God, for we rest in thee." This is the plea of the 
imperilled monarch. This is his argument for the 



A MODEL OF PRAYER IN EMERGENCIES. 39 

rescue of his tottering kingdom: "We are help- 
less. Our forces are outnumbered beyond the 
reach of human daring. We can die, but we can 
do no more. By all chances, as men count them, 
we are doomed. We do not know which way to 
turn. There is no turning for us. We mareh 
right on to death. We are shut up to the arm of 
God. Help, Lord, or we perish." 

This familiar element in the spirit of prayer, 
emergencies force upon our thought. Often divine 
Providence seems to second the procedure of di- 
vine grace by leaving us in a great emergency till 
we feel this. Deliverance is slow in „ coming. 
Prayer is not answered in a breath. The trial 
gathers intensity. The crisis deepens. The tire 
waxes hot. The object seems to be to quicken in 
the soul the sense of God as a reality because he 
is felt to be a necessity. Ruin here, ruin there, 
ruin everywhere except in the one thought that 
there is a God. Intense conceptions of the reality 
of God come to some minds in no other way than 
through this secret alliance of providence and grace 
in the discipline. The needed convictions have to 
be burned in by fiery trial. 

But when the end is gained, when God becomes 
an infinite fact, when we become content to go 
fearless into solitude with God, to cast every 
thing upon God, to rest in God, then believing 
prayer wells up sweet and fresh from the heart, 
and flows out in glad assurance from the lips. 
Then relief, success, conquest, is not far off. 



40 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

In this spirit, not only the great exigencies of 
the Church need to be met, but the emergencies 
of individual life as well. Said Whitefield in one 
of the crises of his life, "I have thrown myself 
blindfold into His almighty arms." Said the late 
Rev. Dr. Griffin in a similar exigency, "I feel 
that God is all that is left to me." 

Every human life lies through some such valleys 
of Ephratah, where the man seems to himself shut 
out from all human sources of support, and shut 
in to solitude with God. If such crises are met in 
the spirit of believing prayer, they are the pre- 
cursors of triumph. Some conquest of opposing 
forces, or some self-conquest preparative to heav- 
en, or some conquest over powers of darkness of 
which only God and angels are the witnesses, is in 
the near future. 

3. Prayer in emergencies, as illustrated in the 
example before us, involves a third element. It is 
a profound identification with God. " In thy name 
we go against this multitude." That is, " The 
battle is not ours, but God's. Our interests are 
lost in God's interests. Selfish desire can have no 
place here. We are lifted and driven beyond all 
that. For God we pray; for God we fight." 

So Luther felt in the great crisis of his life. 
" Here stand I for God : I can do no other." So 
the great leaders of the Church have marched to 
victory. Until the cause at stake is thus identi- 
fied with God, prevailing prayer is impossible. In 



A MODEL OF PRAYER IN EMERGENCIES. 41 

a selfish prayer we beat the winds. Nothing is 
sure in this world but the purposes of God. No 
interests are safe but his. No cause is secure but 
his. 

Until we can get our private individual concerns 
within the lines of his plans, we can be sure of 
nothing. This is the province of believing prayer 
in emergencies, — to lift us up and out from our 
petty selves, and so unite us with God that our 
interests are his because his interests have become 
ours. Our will is his because his will has been 
accepted as ours. Then prayer becomes but a 
prophecy of his decree. Its success is a foregone 
conclusion. While we are speaking, the answer is 
on our own lips. One design, doubtless, of great 
and crushing emergencies, is to help us up to this 
summit of identification with God, by driving us 
up the rocky steep that leads thither. 

4. One other phase of prayer in such emergen- 
cies, suggested by the fragment of biography be- 
fore us, is a hearty recognition of GrooVs ownership 
of us. " O Lord, thou art our God ; let not man 
prevail against thee." 

To Jewish thought the force of this language 
was intensified by comparison with pagan theories 
of Godhead. Every nation was believed to have 
its deity. Ethiopia had her god, and Judaea had 
hers. When a Jew therefore said, " Thou art our 
God," he meant to acknowledge God's ownership 
of him and all his belongings. That any other 



42 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

nation should prevail against Judaea, meant to 
Jewish thought a victory of man over the living 
God. 

This gave deep significance to Jewish prayer on 
the eve of battle. Not only was his cause God's 
cause, by his being identified with God, but he 
and all he had belonged to God. His success, 
therefore, was God's success, and his defeat was 
God's defeat. "Let not man prevail against 
Thee!" 

This conception of prayer in critical exigencies 
fills up the Christian idea of it to the brim. We 
belong to God. Whatever concerns us concerns 
him. Our sorrow is his sorrow. Our joy is his 
joy. If it is best for us that we be delivered, it 
is as much to God as to us that he shall send 
deliverance. No wedge can be driven between, 
to separate him from us, his interests from ours. 
The sacredness and eternity of divine ownership 
are pledged to our success. 

By the right of creation we belong to God. By 
the right of faithful and undying friendship we 
belong to God. By the right of eternal redemp- 
tion we belong to God. By the right of purchase 
with the blood of Christ we belong to God. Will 
God desert his own with such rights as these ? 






AN ANCIENT REVIVAL OF RELIGION. 

When Asa heard these words, he took courage, and put away 
the abominable idols out of all the land, . . . and renewed the 
altar of the Lord. . . . And he gathered all Judah and Ben- 
jamin, and the strangers with them: ... for they fell to him in 
abundance, when they saw that the Lord his God was with him. 
. . . And they entered into a covenant to seek the Lord God of 
their fathers, with all their heart and with all their soul. . . . 
And they sware unto the Lord with a loud voice, and with shout- 
ing, and with trumpets, and with cornets. And all Judah re- 
joiced at the oath: for they had sworn with all their heart, and 
sought him with their whole desire; and he was found of them: 
and the Lord gave them rest round about. — 2 Cheon. xv. 8, 9, 
12-15. 

EEVIVALS are supposed by many to be of 
modern origin ; their opponents say, of mod- 
ern invention. Not so ; for here in the heart of 
the Old Testament we find a record of a revival 
which tallies, with singular accuracy, with similar 
works of divine grace in our own day. 

As the narrative runs, there has been a long 
period of religious decline. Israel has been 
"without the true God, and without a teaching 
priest, and without law." The services of religion 
have been grossly neglected: idolatry has over- 
spread the kingdom. Then trouble comes. As 
usual, God rebukes irreligion by calamity. War 

43 



44 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

ravages the land. No man's life or property is 
safe. " God did vex them with all adversity." 

In their affliction they tnrn again to God. 
" They sought him, and he was found of them." 
God is never far off from men in trouble. An 
obscure prophet, nowhere else named in the 
Scriptures, rouses the king to attempt a general 
reformation of the people. The king sets to work 
with a will, and a wide-spread work of divine 
grace is the result. It is a clear case of deliberate 
seeking for and working for a revival of religion, 
and with success. 

1. Varying somewhat the order of the narra- 
tive, we see first that the heart of a revival lies in a 
renewal of the covenant of the Church with God. 
" They entered into a covenant to seek the Lord 
God of their fathers, with all their heart and with 
all their soul." And again, "They had sworn 
with all their heart, and sought him with their 
whole desire." Clearly they mean to make a 
business of it. It is no half-way affair. With 
the stern zeal characteristic of a semi-civilized 
age and a theocratic government, they determine 
that opposers shall suffer for it. "Whosoever 
would not seek the Lord should be put to death." 
Yes, they are evidently in dead earnest. By their 
, theory the whole nation is the Church ; and the 
Church must be purified, cost what it may. 

One of the laws of the working of the Holy 
Spirit is disclosed here. A revival of religion 



AN ANCIENT REVIVAL OF RELIGION. 45 

begins in the Church of Christ. Rarely, if ever, 
does an exception occur. God does not work 
independently of his chosen people. The con- 
version of the world waits on the will of the 
Church. 

The history of revivals emphasizes this law. 
A dead Church holds back from God the dead 
world. . An awakened Church is the pioneer of an 
awakened world. A fragment of the Church vital- 
ized by the Spirit of God will be felt by a godless 
community. Godly faith is a great power. It 
takes but little of it to set men thinking and 
asking what it means. Apply a little fire, in one 
small spot, to a block of marble, and you soon 
send a fissure rending through the whole. So the 
quickening of one small church by a new infusion 
of divine grace will break up the solidity of sin 
through a whole community. A little group of men 
who mean what they say, and who say the great 
truths of God and an eternal world, will always 
get a hearing. Crowds often follow one man who 
has received a new baptism from on high. There 
is a wonderful magnetism about such a man. 

2. A second feature in this ancient revival of 
religion was a public proclamation of a revived faith 
before the world. It is often objected to modern 
revivals, that men make so much ado about them. 
Religion, it is said, is a still affair. It lies between 
a man's own soul and God. We are commanded 
to pray in secret chambers with the door shut. 



46 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Why all this noise about living to God and saying 
souls ? Rid us of this cant. Give us rather the 
poetry of a silent faith. Let each man look after 
his own soul, and not annoy his neighbors. As 
one such wise man once expressed it, "Let each 
man have a snug little Zion of his own." 

Not so thinks the awakened king of Judah and 
his subaltern chiefs. They make a great ado- about 
the regeneration of the realm. They go through 
the land like the hot-headed reformers in the 
Netherlands; pulling down idols, and rebuilding 
desecrated altars, and putting a stop to ungodly 
rites of worship. Small chance is theirs if they 
try to keep the business secret. " They sware 
unto the Lord with a loud voice, and with shout- 
ing, and with trumpets, and with cornets." Camp- 
meetings and tent-preaching and tabernacles a|e a 
small matter compared with this uprising of a 
whole nation. It is more like the up-springing of 
our country when Sumter fell. We made no silent 
affair of that. 

Religious men in earnest are too much in earnest 
to be still about it. They are moved by a great 
power. It will express itself as becomes a great 
power. Out it will come in speech, in act, in 
prayer, in song, in great enterprise, and in glad 
achievement. It is the instinct of religious faith 
to bear its witness to the world. It is not ashamed. 
Why should it skulk? God has given a great 
deliverance : men must proclaim it to those who 



AN ANCIENT REVIVAL OF RELIGION. 47 

need the same. The pearl is of great price : men 
will rejoice over it. 

A certain degree of publicity, therefore, in a 
spiritual quickening of the Church, is inevitable. 
It is but natural. Other great awakenings work 
in the same way. We do not denounce the ardor 
of a political campaign as the hysteria of old 
women and sick folk. We do not call the rush to 
the gold-mines of California and the Black Hills 
cant. Why, then, judge by a different law the 
great awakenings of men to the realities of eter- 
nity? The Black Hills, with all their golden 
treasure, will one day burn to cinders in volcanic 
fire. The souls of the men now crowding there 
will then be still living somewhere, undying as 
God is. Where ? That is the question the Church 
tries to answer in a great revival. 

On one occasion Edmund Burke came upon the 
hustings to contest a seat in Parliament before an 
excited assembly. The people had come together 
with preparations for bonfires and illuminations, 
and processions marching to the sound of drum 
and fife. When he had just mounted the plat- 
form, the news came that his opponent, who was 
to have met him there that morning, had been just 
found dead in his bed. Both Burke and his hear- 
ers were so overwhelmed by that momentary open- 
ing of the eternal world to their dim vision that 
he could not speak, and they were in no mood to 
hear. He only lifted his voice for one solemn 



48 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

moment, and exclaimed, "What shadows we are, 
and what shadows we pursue ! " Was that cant ? 
Yet a revival of religion is no other than just that 
awakening to the reality of eternal things, and a 
permanent setting of the current of popular 
thought in that channel. Why not ? 

3. This old Jewish revival developed a third 
feature. It ivas attended with a great influx of con- 
verts from without. " The strangers fell to him out 
of Israel in abundance, when they saw that the 
Lord his G-od was with him." So commonly works 
a pure revival upon the world. Very rare is the 
exception in which the heart of the world does not 
respond to the heart of the Church. Growth is 
the law of all life. A tree expands from the life 
of its root. Double the vitality there, and you 
double the fruitage. So is it with the spiritual 
life, of which the Church of God is the centre. 

" They saw that the Lord his God was with him." 
This is the conviction with which a pure revival 
impresses men of the world. A feeling of awe 
often becomes general in a community in which 
the Holy Spirit is moving with great power. The 
consciousness of God fills hearts unused to such 
convictions. 

Many years ago an eminent officer in the gov- 
ernment of Massachusetts returned from Europe 
to his home in an inland town in which a power- 
ful work of divine grace was in progress. He had 
not heard of it. As he passed through the streets, 



AN ANCIENT KEVIVAL OF RELIGION. 49 

the look of things seemed strange to him. The 
countenances of those whom he met impressed 
him with a sense of something unusual. The 
church-bell was tolling at an unusual hour. " What 
has happened here ? " was his inquiry. " Something 
is in the air. Things seem like the day of judg- 
ment." There was no mystery in this. It was like 
the day of judgment. God was there, deciding the 
eternal destiny of hundreds of souls. It proved so 
to that awe-struck man, for he was soon one of the 
rejoicing converts. 

In the great awakening under President Ed- 
wards, men cried out in great assemblies under 
the overpowering sense of the reality of God's 
being. The same phenomenon occurred during 
the " Year of Grace " in Ireland. Under the 
preaching of the late Rev. Dr. Blackburn of Mis- 
souri, men were known to rush out of churches 
and off from camping-grounds, saying that they 
could not bear the terror of God's presence, which 
threatened to crush them. 

Certain animals have a mysterious sense by 
which they discern the coming-on of an earth- 
quake, or the presence of death, before the dull 
eyes and ears of humankind detect them. So 
there seems to be in man a spiritual sense which 
under certain conditions feels the presence of God 
as it cannot at other times. What are the path- 
ological affections of the body, often witnessed in 
intense revivals, but the succumbing of the ner- 



50 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

vous system to spiritual impressions which flesh 
and blood cannot bear with equanimity ? They are 
hints of that awful majesty of God which shook 
Mount Sinai, and which God himself expressed in 
the law, " No man shall see me and live." 

4. A fourth feature of a true revival of religion 
is a thorough reformation of public and private mor- 
als. " Asa took courage, and put away the abom- 
inable idols out of all the land." To put away 
idolatrous worship was what we should call a 
reformation in morals. Idolatry was immorality 
concentrated in most hideous forms. No religious 
zeal could have been genuine in a monarch which 
did not sweep the land clean of them. 

Thus in every so-called revival, the critical test 
of its genuineness is the inquiry, "How does it 
affect the real life of converts ? " It is in perfect 
keeping with such an awakening that a temper- 
ance revival should accompany it. The most 
valuable fruit of Mr. Moody's work in Boston 
during the winter of 1876-77 was believed by 
sage observers to be the reformation of hundreds 
of inebriates and many abandoned women, — re- 
formed because religiously converted. They attrib- 
ute their reformation to no other cause than 
their new-found religion. The metropolitan police 
remarked a perceptible diminution of the crimes 
usually caused by rum. Rumsellers complained 
that their business was interrupted. There are 
localities in New York and Boston where once a 



AN ANCIENT REVIVAL OF RELIGION. 51 

man could not safely go unarmed after nightfall, 
but where now a woman can go safely at midnight ; 
and the power which has wrought the change is 
the work of a few Christian women in mission- 
schools. 

That dishonest men become honest; that false 
men become true ; that drunkards become temper- 
ate ; that vile men become pure ; that lost women 
recover the purity of their childhood; that men 
of intrigue and sharp dealing become guileless in 
act and speech; that profane men become rever- 
ent ; that sabbath-breakers are found in the house 
of God, — these are among the legitimate tokens 
of a great and general revival, which are to be 
reasonably looked for if it is a work of God. One 
of the most significant evidences of conversion 
was given by a poor and ignorant man to a com- 
mittee of examination for his admission to the 
church when he said, " I don't know what reli- 
gion has done for me in my business, except that 
I have burned my bushel-measure." 

An apparent religious awakening which does not 
result in making converts more honest, more truth- 
ful, more pure in private morals, is not worthy of 
trust. God is not in it. The payment of honest 
debts ; dealing in trade by equity rather than by 
law ; the giving-up of tricks of trade ; a living price 
for slop-work ; the sale of pure milk ; the surrender 
of trades which are inimical to public morals ; the 
destruction of distilleries; the refusal to lease 



52 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

houses for immoral uses, and hotels for the sale of 
alcoholic liquors ; care not to be ignorant of such 
leases ; suffering loss of dividends for the observ- 
ance of the Lord's Day ; the honest report of prop- 
erty to assessors ; a fair day's work when working 
for the Government ; refusing to cheat the post- 
office ; truthful invoices of imported goods ; honest 
oaths at the custom-house; in a word, freedom 
from guile in transactions of business, — these are 
among the proper fruits of a revival of religion. 
The world has a right to look for them. The 
world is right in heaping its indignation and con- 
tempt on any religious epidemic which does not 
prove its right to exist by these plain signs of a live 
conscience in worldly affairs. Shall a man be a 
smooth and smiling communicant in God's Church, 
doing service, it may be, at the Lord's table, and 
at same time a fit candidate for the penitentiary? 
God is on the side of the world in its indignant 
protest. "Your new moons and sabbaths, and 
calling of assemblies, I cannot away with ; incense 
is an abomination unto me ; when ye make many 
prayers, I will not hear." 

Of all compounds of human weakness and 
depravity, the most repulsive is a bonfire of reli- 
gious cant, winch is all feeling and no principle, 
all talk and no character, all prayer and no life, all 
Sunday and no week-day. Ye whited sepulchres ! 
Ye generation of vipers ! The holiest of men join 
the indignant outcry of the world against such 



AN ANCIENT REVIVAL OF RELIGION. 53 

nauseating hypocrisy. That is a wise and always 
timely petition of the Church of England : " From 
the deceits of the world, from the crafts of the 
Devil, good Lord, deliver us ! " 

5. One other fact suggested by this ancient 
model of a revival is, that often such awakenings 
are followed by periods of temporal prosperity. 
" The Lord gave them rest round about." In 
that semi-civilized age the symbol of all temporal 
calamities was a state of chronic war, and the 
symbol of all temporal blessings was a state of 
peace. Eest from civil and foreign discord meant 
the prosperity of the arts of peace. The encour- 
agement of industry, the increase of property, the 
unity of families, the preservation of young life, 
the growth of the able-bodied population, the in- 
crease of the comforts of civilization, and the 
advance of the general culture, all attended long- 
continued peace. This was the blessing which 
God gave as a sequence of the quickening of the 
national conscience. 

Not always do all forms of temporal blessing 
attend repentance and holy living. But such is 
the tendency of a godly life. The promises of 
God have never yet been tested by the spiritual 
conversion of an entire nation. That test the 
Christian religion is to receive in the golden age 
which prophecy promises to the Church. The ces- 
sation of war and intemperance alone would double 
the property of the globe in a single generation. 



54 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

All that facts bear witness to at present is that 
the drift of religious living is to better a man's 
worldly condition. Many a country village has 
been improved in its physical condition — in the 
comfort of families ; in the lessening of poverty ; 
in the peace of neighborhoods ; in the charitable- 
ness of conversation ; in the obedience of children ; 
in the fidelity of parents; in the refinement of 
amusements ; in the adornment of streets ; in the 
beautifying of cemeteries; in aspirations toward 
literature, art, and general culture — by a thor- 
ough renovation of its society through a powerful 
revival of religion. No other civilizing power 
equals that of pure religion. It never hurts a 
man, for any of the right uses of this world, to 
make a Christian of him. 



CHRISTIAN ALLIANCES WITH WICKED MEN. 

And Jehu the son of Hanani the seer . . . said to king Je- 
hoshaphat, Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love them that 
hate the Lord? — 2 Chroi*. xix. 2. 

IT is wonderful at how many points the biogra- 
phies of the Old Testament touch modern 
life. 

"Shouldest thou help the ungodly, and love 
them that hate the Lord? " Such is the reproof 
addressed by the prophet to the king of Judah. 
Jehoshaphat seems to have been a good sort of 
man, as the world goes, — better than the average 
of his age. " Good things are found in thee," 
is the kindly judgment of the prophet about him. 
But he was an ambitious man. He wanted to 
stand well with the world. He aspired to the 
glory of a splendid reign. To promote his politi- 
cal aspirations, he sought alliance with one of the 
most impious princes of the time, and an apostate 
from the true religion. . As the monarch of a theo- 
cratic government he could hardly have done a 
worse thing. 

Jehoshaphat was a representative man, — repre- 
sentative of a large class of good men in every 

55 



56 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

age, who for selfish, ends choose their friends from 
among the irreligious and the worldly. 

1. The friendship of wicked men is one of the 
most dangerous social temptations to which Chris- 
tians are subjected. Modern life in cities illustrates 
it with special force. 

The wealth of the world is very largely in the 
hands of men who are not the friends of Christ. 
Wealth is a great power. It commands respect. 
Honestly gained and properly used, it deserves 
respect. It is not necessarily a sin to desire the 
friendship of the rich. 

In many communities intelligence and culture 
also are possessed mainly by the irreligious. Re- 
ligion often thrives best amongst the poor and the 
illiterate. 

"Not many rich or noble called, 
Not many great or wise : 
They whom God makes his kings and priests 
Are poor in human eyes." 

They who heard Christ gladly were the com- 
mon people. " Have any of the rulers believed on 
him ? " His chosen apostles were humble trades- 
men and fisher-folk. 

Irreligious men are often very bright men. 
They are brilliant conversers, ready wits, racy in 
thought and speech. Even profane men are forci- 
ble talkers. The society of such men is often fas- 
cinating. Fun, repartees, humorous anecdote, 
though not forbidden by the Christian religion, it 



CHRISTIAN ALLIANCES WITH WICKED MEN. 57 

must be conceded, are not its strong points. Irre- 
ligion often seems to have a monopoly of them. 
The joy of a godly life does not depend largely 
on the risible faculties. The young, therefore, 
often find powerful allurement to irreligious friend- 
ships in the social brilliancy of those who are 
living without God.- 

The interests of business sometimes create a 
similar peril. Two men once took the lease of a 
hotel. One was a professing Christian, the other 
not. The enterprise threatened to bankrupt them 
both. Nothing could save them but the secret 
and illegal sale of intoxicating drinks. The Chris- 
tian partner's faith was not strong enough to with- 
stand the resolute selfishness of the other. 

In a higher circle of life professional success 
often tempts a young man of aspiring mind to 
seek to ally himself with those who love not God, 
and care nothing for his cause. Many years ago 
a young lawyer, who afterwards became a mem- 
ber of the House of Representatives of the United 
States, was a member of an obscure church in the 
mountains of New England. So long as he re- 
mained nestled among the Mils, he was faithful to 
the religion of his fathers. But his professional 
prospects required him to migrate to the metropo- 
lis. There he found himself in a new world. 
The faith of his childhood was unpopular. Yery 
largely it was the faith of the poor and the middling 
classes of society. The wealth, the culture, the 



58 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

social rank, the professional prestige, of the com- 
munity, were compacted in almost solid phalanx 
against it. Prejudice against it ran so high, that 
the churches in which it was preached were 
branded with opprobrious nicknames. Their wor- 
shippers were hustled in the street. 

It was a severe temptation to the youthful and 
brilliant lawyer, who may have felt that he had 
the making of a great statesman in his brain. 
The necessities of his professional future — yes, 
of his professional usefulness — seemed to compel 
him to abandon the old faith of the Pilgrims, and 
to seek association with the magnates of the bar 
and bench by casting in his lot with those who 
denied Christ. He fell before the temptation. 
From that time to his death, his religious faith, 
though probably not theoretically changed, was 
clouded over, and practically buried under his 
professional alliances. 

This form of trial is often not only severe, but 
insidious. The wiles of a crafty adversary seldom 
create one more plausible and alluring. There 
seems to be no escape from it, and often nothing 
fatal in it. Men find themselves confronted by a 
compact and insurmountable wall of circumstance, 
which shuts them in and hedges them around. 
As they see things, no course is left to them, but 
to choose their friends from the secret or avowed 
enemies to the cross of Christ. Said an excellent 
Christian lady not long ago, "Almost my entire 



CHKISTIAN ALLIANCES WITH WICKED MEN. 59 

circle of friends is made up of those who have no 
sympathy with my religion. In the city where I 
live, there are no others with whom I can associate 
on terms of social equality." 

2. Of this trial of Christian principle, it should 
be further said, that the Christian religion requires 
no narrow or ascetic seclusion from the world. " I 
pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the 
world, but that thou shouldest keep them from 
the evil." Such was the sensible prayer of our 
Lord for his disciples. No fanaticism here. It is 
our chief discipline for a better world, to learn to 
live as a good man should in this world. 

A crystal is sometimes formed in the embrace 
of a bowlder of granite. To clear it of its rough 
enclosure, and to bring its beautiful facets to the 
light, Nature submerges it in deep waters, shatters 
it by tempests, and abrades it by contact with 
stones and mud, and the rubbish of the sea. Thus 
a redeemed soul is by the plan of God immersed 
in the cares and toils and enticements and useful- 
ness of a world of sin, so that by sheer resistance 
to evil, and abrasion with depravity, it may be 
polished to the transparent image of Him who 
made it. 

The thing which Christian principle forbids is 
the seeking of worldly friendships and alliances 
for selfish ends, and to the peril of religious use- 
fulness and religious character. Every Christian's 
good sense discerns the distinction, and acknowl- 
edges its reasonableness. 



60 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT* 

3. Yet the irreligious friendships of religious 
men violate the ruling spirit of the Scriptures. A 
deliberate invitation of this form of temptation is 
close akin to apostasy. Gloss it over as we may, 
— and very ingenious and winsome are the dis- 
guises by which a deceived conscience can adorn 
it, — gloss it over as we please, it is a policy of 
life which starts wrong. Therefore it threatens 
catastrophe in the end. 

The Scriptures recognize but two grades of 
caste in this world, — the good and the bad ; the 
righteous and the wicked ; the friends of God and 
the enemies of God. In the incisive language of 
the New Testament, men are all either saints or 
sinners. In the world, not of the world ; come ye 
out from among them; be ye separate; a royal 
priesthood; a peculiar people; strangers and pil- 
grims on earth, — such are the mottoes by which 
inspired wisdom indicates the followers of Christ. 
The very being of the Church is for the purpose 
of keeping alive and fresh in human thought that 
old distinction between saint and sinner. Between 
the two the great gulf is fixed. They drift asun- 
der in this world, as they are to be kept asunder 
in the next world. 

Now, a Christian who subjects his Christian 
faith to worldly policy in the choice of his asso- 
ciates in life strikes right athwart the whole range 
of scriptural command and admonition and expos- 
tulation and example. No Christian can safely 
do that. 



CHEISTIAN ALLIANCES WITH WICKED MEN. 61 

The statesman to whom I have referred, with 
all his brilliant ingenuity, did not escape the 
apparent wrecking of his religions faith on this 
rock. From the honr in which he deliberately 
abandoned the religious connections of his youth, 
the spirituality of his religious character declined. 
He was never afterwards known to the world as 
even a professing Christian. Though nominally 
such, he mingled with men for years, and they 
never knew it. He was practically a man of the 
world, a lover of the world, an honored leader 
of the world, worthy of all the dignities he re- 
ceived, and more, but an alien from the people of 
God. He lost his reverence for the Christian 
sabbath. He forsook, for long intervals, the 
Lord's table. Even to the laws of Christian 
morality he became treacherous. His veracity, his 
honesty, his temperance, his chastity, all were 
submerged in his intense and overmastering world- 
liness before he died. 

Though, at the last, a few not very positive 
words on his death-bed left his Christian friends 
not utterly without hope that he died a penitent 
believer, yet his public career of more than forty 
years belied the hope. For the great distinctive 
ends of Christian living and usefulness, his life 
was a failure. It ended a blackened ruin of that 
which had a splendid beginning, and gave magnifi- 
cent promise for the future. 

4. This suggests that entangling alliances with 



62 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

the world often involve an immense sacrifice of 
Christian usefulness. 

A man cannot be greatly useful as a Christian 
without great positiveness of religious character. 
It lies in the very nature of our religion, that a 
man must believe it with his whole soul. He 
must give his whole being to it. In a divided 
heart it cannot live. One who tries the experi- 
ment pulls down with one hand what he builds 
up with the other. He drenches every sacred fire 
he kindles. He does not win the world to Christ. 
The world wins him. 

Such a man is commonly a dead weight in the 
Church. If not that, he owes what good influence 
he has to other things than his religion. A 
spiritual power in the Church he is not, and cannot 
be. He never- heads a forlorn hope on God's side 
of things. If he is even a silent looker-on in the 
conflict, and not an active opponent of the more 
spiritual developments of Christ's kingdom, that 
is the best that can be hoped for from him. 

Such men are very apt to be opposers of re- 
vivals. In great awakenings they are ultra con- 
servatives. Their instinct is to carp at or ignore 
such movements. The enemy of souls often finds 
in a group of such men his most efficient auxil- 
iary. When at last death surprises them into a 
'more truthful view of things, they often die mourn- 
ing over a wasted and perverted life. 

An old English proverb says, " He must have a 



CHKISTTAN ALLIANCES WITH WICKED MEN. 63 

long spoon who would sup with the Devil." The 
saddest feature in the career of such men is that 
Satan most disastrously outwits them. They do 
not build as they think to build. They are be- 
guiled, hoodwinked, led blindfold, to the loss of 
all that a child of God should hold most dear. 
They are Samsons: mighty, it may be, in re- 
sources of worldly prowess; great against foxes, 
lions, bears ; but weaker than an infant in the lap 
of Delilah, and blind captives in the prison-house 
of Philistines. 

5. Christian alliances with the wicked do not 
command the respect of the very men for whose favor 
they are formed. Men of the world are very keen 
in their judgments of Christian character. They 
know what is consistent Christian living, when 
they see it, as well as we do. Indeed, their theo- 
retic ideal of a Christian life is commonly more 
exalted than that of men who are struggling to 
realize it. No other class of men are so prompt to 
tell us what they would do if they believed as we 
do, as those who believe nothing. An upright and 
downright Christian they always revere. In heart 
they niake obeisance to him as to no other type of 
man. Do you not know a godless man who professes 
to have lost all faith in religion, but who makes 
exception of some one humble Christian woman, — 
his mother perhaps, or sister, or wife ? " If ever 
human being gets to heaven, she will," is his tes- 
timony. That one life keeps open to his faith the 
celestial gates. 



64 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Said Walter Scott, on one occasion, to his daugh- 
ter, — substantially, I quote from memory, — "I 
know this world ; I have read many books ; I have 
known many splendidly educated men in my time ; 
but I declare to you that I have heard more lofty 
and noble sentiments from the lips of poor, unedu- 
cated men and women in times of trouble, than I 
ever met with elsewhere outside of the pages of 
the Bible." Yes, the world reveres the honest 
principles of our religion in plain, honest lives. 

By the same instinctive insight into facts, they 
recoil with contempt when they encounter men or 
women who sacrifice those principles to worldly 
policy or social ambitions. They never at heart 
trust such a man. They may use him as they do 
other tools ; but they never love him in return, 
because they cannot trust him. 

In religion, as in other things, few things 
command the respect of the world like courage. 
Fidelity to honest convictions, conformity of heart 
to the faith of the head, the struggle at least to 
make the heart tally with the profession, the world 
bows reverently to these things always. Men will 
bear to be browbeaten by an act of religious fidel- 
ity better than to be fawned upon. They tolerate 
a fanatic sooner than a traitor. We all respect 
a pugilist more than we do a coward. A profess- 
ing Christian never makes a meaner blunder than 
when he thinks to flatter wicked men, and win 
their good-will, by trampling on his deepest con 
victions, or ignoring his most solemn vows. 






CHKISTIAN ALLIANCES WITH WICKED MEN. 65 

6. Loving those that hate God inflicts a wound 
of great severity on the feelings of the Lord Jesus 
Christ. When a young man is choosing his life's 
companions, Christ is looking on. When a young 
woman is wavering between the Church of Christ 
and the world, in her choice of the dearest friend 
she is ever to know, Christ is watching the trem- 
bling scales. 

Every professed follower of his, Christ regards 
as his personal friend. He loves him as if he were 
the only friend left him. Picture his look on the 
scared Peter. Think of him in Gethsemane say- 
ing, " Could ye not watch with me one hour ? " 
See him on the cross, turning his languid eyes in 
search of his hiding disciples. Every one who 
bears his name, he remembered and thought of 
in that supreme hour. 

To-day he longs for your friendship, my brother, 
as if there were no other one in the universe to 
share the gift of his life's blood. He would have 
died for you alone, as readily as for countless mil- 
lions. Hear him : " I was hungry, and ye gave 
me no meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave me no 
drink ; I was sick, and ye took me not in." Deeds 
of common human kindness, such as we lavish on 
a stranger, he longed for. He longs for them now. 
From you, from me, from each one whom he died 
for, he craves the human love which is so precious 
to us all. Love is hurt if it is not loved in return. 

What, then, must his feelings be when he sees 






66 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

one who has been his friend, turning coldly from 
him, and choosing in his place the friendship of 
the world which crucified him, and which would 
crucify him again ? My brother, it is not so much 
that you are losing Christ, as that Christ is losing 
you. It is from Calvary that the voice comes now 
to each one of us in our solitude : " Shouldest thou 
love them that hate the Lord ? " 



HONORING GOD'S HOUSE. 

And it came to pass after this, that Joash was minded to 
repair the house of the Lord. . . . And he gathered together the 
priests and the Levites, and said to them, Go out unto the cities 
of Judah, and gather of all Israel money to repair the house of 
your God from year to year, and see that ye hasten the matter. 
... So the workmen wrought, and the work was perfected by 
them, and they set the house of God in his state, and strength- 
ened it. — 2 Chkon. xxiv. 4, 5, 13. 

IT is popular in our day to decry as superstition 
that devout instinct which reveres a Christian 
temple as God's peculiar dwelling-place. Cold- 
blooded men say, " It is no more than any other 
mass of bricks and mortar." Poetry, too, has 
much to say of worshipping God in fields and 
forests and mountains and valleys, and on the sea. 
A good deal of watery sentiment has been ex- 
pended by sabbath-breakers on " Nature's first 
temple." 

The undoubted truth of God's omnipresence is 
about all the truth there is underneath this popular 
twaddle. Let us see, then, what reason we have 
for regarding a place of Christian worship with 
peculiar reverence. 

1. The biblical history of the idea of a place where 



68 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

God is worshipped represents it as one of peculiar 
and awful sanctity. The development of the con- 
ception of " the Lord's house " in the Scriptures 
is deeply interesting. The most ancient hint of it 
in any known literature is found in the Book of 
Job. " Nature's first temple " was as magnificent 
then as now; yet the afflicted patriarch laments, 
" Oh that I knew where I might find Him, that I 
might come even to his seat!" He longs to fix 
upon some spot where he can find God, — some place 
where the awful distance between him and God 
shall be lessened. Just because God is every- 
where, he seems, to himself, to find him nowhere. 

This is human nature. Call it infirmity if you 
will : still it is human nature. The intuitions of 
the race have acknowledged it. Groves, moun- 
tains, grottoes, caves, streams, valleys, plains, lakes, 
as well as altars and temples, have been conse- 
crated as the abodes of gods. As we instinctively 
clothe our conception of God in human form, and 
seem to hear his voice, dread his eye, see his hand, 
hear his footfall, so we intuitively assign to him 
some place which we approach with awe. Is this 
all falsehood? It is not like God to make the 
soul of man a liar in its very nature. 

" Nature's first temple " was as grand and impos- 
ing in Abraham's day as now : yet he went three- 
days' journey with his costly sacrifice to Mount 
Moriah; and there, in a definite and becoming 
place y he found and worshipped God. Isaac was 



69 



fond of walking in the fields at eventide ; but he 
built an altar at Beersheba, because God there 
appeared to him, and blessed him. The heavens 
were resplendent with the constellations of a 
Syrian sky when Jacob spent a night in the open 
plain. The ground was his couch, and a stone 
was his pillow. But he discovered before morning 
that God was there ; and he called the place Beth- 
el, and said, " How dreadful is this place ! This 
is none other than the house of God ; and this is 
the gate of heaven." Again he spends a solitary 
night under the open sky, and his dreams are 
troubled. He seems to be struggling with an 
august and mysterious stranger till the daybreak. 
And he calls that place " Peniel ; " for, says he, 
" I have seen God face to face." 

Moses is keeping flocks near Mount Horeb, and 
a bush on fire turns him aside. He thinks it " a 
great sight," for he discovers that God is there. 
He hears a voice saying, " Draw not nigh hither : 
put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place 
whereon thou standest is holy ground." Again, 
when Moses leads the people out of Egypt, not 
every man's tent is God's dwelling, but a pillar of 
cloud and of fire leads the march, and God is in 
the pillar. Arrived at Sinai, amidst thunder and 
lightning and tempest and fire, and " a voice of 
words," God is found high up in the mountain 
and the cloud. Moses goes up into the thick 
darkness where God is. There he receives the 



70 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

pattern of the tabernacle, and that becomes for 
generations the peculiar mercy-seat of God. The 
people fear exceedingly, and tremble, and cry out, 
" Let not God speak with us, lest we die ! " 

At length the kingdom of Judah reaches its 
golden age; and the temple rises in far-famed 
splendor. God says of it, "I have hallowed this 
place, to put my name there forever." The tem- 
ple of Solomon was the original ideal of a house 
of God, realized in architecture unrivalled in that 
age. A whole nation poured out its treasures in 
the building. The wisest of monarchs tasked 
the skill of the most ingenious artificers, and the 
genius of the most accomplished architects of the 
times. It was the Jewish St. Peter's. Ophir sent 
its pure gold, and Lebanon its magnificent cedars. 
Jerusalem and Tyre united their navies as trans- 
port ships. " The house of God " must be made 
" exceeding magnifical, of fame and glory through- 
out all countries." So hallowed was the place, 
and so sacred the work, that it must proceed in 
hushed stillness. Because God was to dwell there, 
" neither hammer nor axe, nor any tool of iron," 
must be " heard in the house while it was in build- 
ing." It must grow in silence, as forests grow. 

" No workman's steel nor ponderous axes rung J 
Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprung." 

When finished it was one of the wonders of the 
world. The reporters of the age could not tell 



HONORING GOD'S HOUSE. 71 

the half of it. Sheba's queen was abashed as she 
approached it, and " there was no more spirit in 
her." 

Such is the biblical conception of the sacredness 
of the house of God. " The holy place ; the holy 
hill; the place where mine honor dwelleth; the 
gate of heaven : " so the Bible describes in brief 
its unutterable sanctity. 

2. The Bible represents the building and repairing 
of the Lord's house as acts of eminent piety. The 
historian says of Joash in the context, that he 
was a godly man as long as he had the guidance 
of the celebrated priest Jehoiada. Yet the only 
thing thought worthy of mention in that part of 
his reign is, that " he was minded to repair the 
house of the Lord." 

It was counted an act of signal devotion in 
David, that he was minded " to build the house 
of the Lord." Only the awful sacredness of the 
work forbade David's doing it, because he had 
been a man of war. It was incongruous with the 
divine idea, that a military chief, who had shed 
much blood, should set his hand to a work so holy. 
The dignity of a great civilian, and the most highly 
cultured monarch of the age, was better suited to 
its hallowed purpose. Of Solomon's long and 
splendid reign, the erection of the temple was the 
crowning deed, renowned alike as a token of his 
wisdom and his piety. The chief object of one 
entire book of the Bible — the Book of Nehemiah 
— is to record the building of the second temple. 



72 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Passing on to later times, the most significant 
token of the divine idea of the temple where God 
dwelt is found in the fact that our Lord accepted 
it as the symbol of his own sacred body. "He 
spake of the temple of his body." His resurrec- 
tion, the crowning event of his sinless life, was a 
rebuilding of a temple. When the apostles also 
would express to Christian believers the most ex- 
alted conception of their consecrated character in 
God's sight, the form of the admonition is, u Ye 
are the temple of God. Whoso defileth the tem- 
ple of God, Mm shall God destroy." 

3. In perfect keeping with the biblical idea on 
this subject, it is the instinct of a devout heart, every- 
ivliere and alivays, to revere the house in which Giod 
is 'publicly worshipped. Like every other vital 
principle of religion, it may degenerate into' super- 
stition. But it is natural to the spirit of worship. 
Catholic Christians are right in their reverent 
regard for their churches and utensils of service. 
If Protestant Christians have lost the ancient spirit 
of the Church in this respect, they are none the 
better for it. 

An incident occurred in Boston not long ago, 
which made me wish that all our churches were 
open for daily and hourly individual worship. A 
poor emigrant-woman, with her helpless children, 
apparently just from the ship in which they had 
come to a strange land, saw a Protestant church, 
on the spire of which was the familiar cross. She 



73 



thought it a temple of her own faith. But, as its 
doors were closed, she could not enter ; and she 
devoutly knelt with her children on the pavement, 
and offered silent prayer. She was a stranger in a 
strange land. Strange faces and sounds which she 
could not understand were all around her; but 
there was one thing which was familiar and dear 
to her, — the cross, emblematic of our common 
Redeemer. She could understand that. I seemed 
to hear her voice as her heart flowed out in grate- 
ful prayer for herself and children in the new life 
which they were beginning, or in thanksgiving for 
their safety from the perils of the sea. Was that 
superstition ? I could not call it so. ♦ 

I once sat in the shadow of one of the arches 
of the Colosseum at Rome, in the autumnal moon- 
light, and alone. That ruin has long since been 
consecrated as a place of Christian worship. A 
cross stands in the centre, around which a crowd 
of worshippers is often gathered on a Friday, lis- 
tening to very earnest, and by no means unchris- 
tian, preaching. As I sat there trying to picture 
the scenes of the early martyrdoms which had oc- 
curred there, when Christian captives were thrown 
to wild beasts amidst the ferocious plaudits of a 
hundred thousand spectators in the galleries above, 
a solitary peasant came through; and bending 
under his burden of fagots, and unconscious that 
any human eye was looking on, he knelt and of- 
fered silent prayer before the cross. The cross 



74 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

was nothing to my Puritan iconoclasm ; and the 
promise on the placard appended to it, of deliver- 
ance from I do not know how much time in pur- 
gatory to any one who shall imprint a kiss there, 
saddened me. But I could not judge by my se- 
verer faith the impulsive devotion of the poor 
Italian. I wanted to grasp his hand as that of a 
Christian brother. He was expressing in his way 
the same instinct of religious reverence which I 
felt in looking upon the spot where thousands of 
Christian martyrs had sealed their fate in blood. 
Who shall judge between us, and say that my mood 
was religion, and his superstition ? 

It may have been an extreme of this instinct 
which led Dr. Samuel Johnson to lift his hat rev- 
erently whenever he passed a church in the streets 
of London ; but better that than the covered head 
and the laugh and the jest often seen and heard in 
our churches. That is a becoming, because a per- 
fectly sensible, act of reverence, in which worship- 
pers of the Church of England bow the head in 
silent prayer at the beginning of public religious 
service. Our plainer forms of worship would be 
improved by the usage. 

4. The associations of the Lord's house are an 
incalculable help to the culture of religious character. 
We are creatures of association. We are often 
moved more profoundly than we think by our 
surroundings. The recollection of our experiences 
in the house of God may be among the most 



HONORING GOD'S HOUSE. 75 

precious treasures that memory hoards. The 
prayers we have heard there ; the old hymns of the 
fathers, some of them redolent with the incense 
of a thousand years; the sermons which have 
moved us ; the Scriptures read and expounded ; 
certain texts which were new to us and most 
timely ; the light of the setting sun streaming in 
at western windows when it seemed like the glory 
of God's countenance ; the seat where the mother 
sat holding fast our childish hand, or the corner 
from which the father turned his loving eye upon 
us in mild reproof : the pews from which sainted 
men and women have gone to their rest, — oh, 
there are holy forces in such reminiscences ! They 
are "golden vials full of odors." They come back 
to us in after-years, "trailing clouds of glory." 
They make the very walls of the house of God 
eloquent. The stone cries out of the wall, and 
the beam out of the timber answers it. The very 
silence of the place on a week-day is more potent 
than angels' voices. O thou homely "meeting- 
house " of my youth, God bless thee ! If I forget 
thee, let my right hand forget her cunning ; if I 
do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the 
roof of my mouth ! 

An eminent statesman of our country, whose 
funeral was attended by reverent thousands, once 
boasted flippantly that he " had not seen the inside 
of a church in twelve years." Well, he had sought 
other things, and he had his reward. But his 



76 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

character, through his long public career, showed 
the want of just those qualities which devout at- 
tendance on the services of religion would have 
tended to develop. He was irreverent, unchar- 
itable, selfish, intemperate in speech, one-sided in 
policy, a man of few friends, whom all men feared 
but few could love. And, so far as men could see, 
— God knows how truthfully, — he died as the 
fool clieth. Not one word of Christian consolation 
relieved his last agonies. He uttered not one 
word which could indicate whether he believed in 
God or not, whether he had a soul or not, whether 
he thought of or cared for the world to which he 
was going. An educated Greek who had never 
heard of the New Testament might have died as 
calmly and as rationally. Socrates died more ra- 
tionally. Many a savage in our Western wilds has 
died chanting his tribal cleath-song, with more evi- 
dence of fitness to meet the Great Spirit than that 
man over whose bier thousands went through the 
forms of magnificent mourning. " I had rather be 
a doorkeeper in the house of my God than to 
dwell in the tents of wickedness." 

5. A Christian church is the most significant em- 
blem we have of heaven. " This is the gate of 
heaven," said the astonished patriarch. He had 
seen angels. Heaven seemed very near to him. 

There was reason in the simple faith of our 
fathers, which interpreted these words so literally 
that they longed to build their tombs underneath 



HONOKING GOD'S HOUSE. 77 

the churches where they and their fathers wor- 
shipped, or in the cheerful " God's acre " around 
them. They wanted to be close at hand when the 
morning dawned. 

It was one of the strange omissions which at- 
tracted the wonder of St. John in the New Jeru- 
salem, that he saw no temple there. But he adds 
as a reason, ample in his view, that the Lord God 
Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it. Let 
us not lift irreverently the veil from these words ; 
yet they must mean so much as this, — that in 
some mysterious way the ineffable Godhead will 
do for us there what the material temples of our 
worship do here. These are the antechamber to 
that awful yet precious Presence. 

It is an inspiring thought also, that the most 
intelligible conception the Scriptures give us of 
the occupations of the heavenly life is that of 
churchly song. The service of song is the one 
grand hint which our embodied spirits can com- 
prehend of what heaven is, and what we are to do 
there. Active as we doubtless shall be beyond all 
conceptions of our tired faculties here ; migrating, 
it may be, in chariots of eager thought, to distant 
and invisible portions of the universe, — yet all 
that we do shall be done in the spirit of such ecs- 
tatic gladness, that we shall live in a state of holy 
and triumphant song. Melody shall express, more 
than any other one idea, our doing and our being. 

For one, I cannot rid myself of the hope, too, 



78 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

that we shall sometimes — perhaps on great anni- 
versaries commemorative of earthly histories — 
literally sing the very psalms and hymns which 
are so often the " gate of heaven " to us here. It 
would be sadder parting with this world than we 
hope it will be when our time comes, if we must 
forget these ancient lyrics, or find our tongues 
dumb when we would utter them. How can we 
live without them ? Are they not a part of our very 
being ? Take them away, with all the experiences 
of which they are the symbol, and what would 
there be left of us to carry into heaven ? 

Some lines, at least, of the hymn " Rock of ages, 
cleft for me," and " My faith looks up to thee," 
and " Not all the blood of beasts," and " Nearer, 
my. God, to thee," and " Just as I am, without one 
plea," — must we part with them ? It would be 
like parting with the recognition of friends in 
heaven. 

What disembodied life, if there is such a thing, 
may be, I do not know. To my earth-bound 
thought it is what I imagine the gorgeous pinions 
and sportive flights of the butterfly are to the 
caterpillar. But one thing I hope and pray for : 
Of old friends, and old scriptures, and old hymns, 
and old litanies, and old churches where the 
fathers worshipped their God and mine, Lord, 
keep my memory green forever ! 



PRESUMPTION IN THE WORSHIP OF GOD. 

But when [Uzziah] was strong, his heart was lifted up to his 
destruction: for he transgressed against the Lord his God, and 
went into the temple of the Lord to burn incense upon the altar 
of incense. . . . And Azariah the priest went in after him, and 
with him fourscore priests of the Lord, that were valiant men: 
. . . And they withstood Uzziah the king, and said unto him, It 
appertaineth not to thee, Uzziah, to burn incense unto the Lord, 
but to the priests, the sons of Aaron, that are consecrated to 
burn incense. Go out of the sanctuary, for thou hast trespassed. 
. . . Then Uzziah was wroth, and had a censer in his hand to 
burn incense : and while he was wroth with the priests, the lep- 
rosy even rose up in his forehead before the priests in the house 
of the Lord, from beside the incense altar. . . . And Azariah the 
chief priest, and all the priests, looked upon him, and, behold, he 
was leprous in his forehead, and they thrust him out from thence ; 
yea, himself hasted also to go out, because the Lord had smitten 
him. — 2 Chkon. xxvi. 16-20. 

THE punishment of sin by bodily disease is 
commonly long in coming. It is one of the 
apparent after-thoughts of retribution in which God 
clearly expresses his accumulated anger against sin 
long ago committed, and perhaps forgotten. 

The case of Uzziah is one of the few instances 
recorded in the Scriptures of instant and severe 
punishment of the sin of irreverence and presump- 
tion. God does not always punish sin in the same 
way. The sin is the same, age after age. It is 

79 



80 STUDIES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

marvellous how human nature repeats itself, but 
God's treatment of the wrong is infinitely diversi- 
fied. That irreverent worshippers are not all lep- 
ers, is no proof that they are more pleasing to God 
now than when the Judsean king was rebuked by 
that loathsome disease. 

Let us note some of the ways in which the guilt 
of presumption in the worship of God is often in- 
curred in modern times. 

1. It ought not to provoke a smile when the 
first is named as that of sleeping in G-ooVs house. 
We must not be severe — for God is not so — in 
judging of the aged and the infirm and the diseased, 
whose worn-out powers yield to the soporific at- 
mosphere, and perhaps the more soporific sermon, 
on a hot Sunday in July. One of the most touch- 
ing illustrations of God's charitable judgment of 
physical infirmity is our Lord's plaintive inquiry 
of his sleepy disciples in the garden, in which 
there is only a low undertone of reproof: " Could 
ye not watch with me one hour?" Think of 
falling asleep in Gethsemane ! Could you or I 
have done it ? Yet Christ was very gentle in his 
thought of his weary disciples ; and so he is of us, 
if age or disease renders sleep irresistible. Certain 
insomniac patients have been known, who for the 
most part could sleep only in the house of God. 
Not to such is the infirmity charged as sin. 

But when no such excuse exists, when sleep is 
welcomed by the hale worshipper as a means of 



PRESUMPTION IN THE WORSHIP OF GOD. 81 

whiling away an irksome hour, few things of the 
silent sort can be more impertinent to the most high 
Godo Should we sleep anywhere else where God 
should make his awful presence known ? Should 
we have slept through the earthquake at Sinai? 
Shall we sleep in the day of judgment ? Even in 
our death-hour do we not hope at least to have all 
our faculties about us and wide awake? The case 
is too plain for argument. That man coolly insults 
God, who needlessly composes himself to slumber, 
when professing to be a suppliant for mercy at his 
feet. 

2. Similar is the presumption of neglecting to 
participate in divine worship when present in God's 
house. Negative sins are sometimes most intensely 
sinful. Heedless sins are sometimes most fearfully 
fatal. 

If you were one of a delegation to the Court of 
St. James, for the presentation of a petition, and 
were admitted to audience with the Queen, should 
you think it becoming to the dignity of the royal 
presence to neglect the business in hand, and to 
wander about the apartment curiously, while your 
chairman was presenting the petition in your name ? 
Yet that which would be only a breach of etiquette 
there, is a much graver offence in the house of 
God. A listless and wandering mind roving like 
fool's eyes, in the temple of worship, is a most in- 
solent indignity to the King of kings. 

Look at it in another light. When the Rev. Dr. 



82 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Armstrong was wrecked with a large number of 
fellow-passengers on one of the Sound steamers, 
many years ago, his last act was to gather his 
doomed companions together in the shattered cabin, 
and, while the ship was thumping to pieces on the 
rocks, he committed their souls and his own to 
God in prayer. It was his last chance, and theirs, 
to pray this side of eternity. Men who had not 
prayed for years prayed then, with agony of desire. 
If you had been one of that group, would you have 
stood or sat in silent contempt of the solemnity ? 
Yet you may he doing just that, — flinging insult 
*in the face of God on the threshold of eternity, 
and tossing to the winds your last chance of prayer, 
— every time you listen to public worship in which 
you do not reverently join. 

There is yet another aspect of it. Like all other 
presumptuous sins, the hearing of prayer without 
participating in the service has a peculiarly indu- 
rating effect on the conscience. The habit deadens 
all the moral sensibilities auxiliary to conscience. 
The sense of gratitude is dulled if thanksgiving to 
God falls on the ear without awakening response 
of heart. The susceptibility of penitence is blunt- 
ed if confession of sin is offered in the hearing of 
an unanswering soul. The sense of honor is be- 
numbed if one incurs the meanness of listening 
unmoved to an acknowledgment of God's claims 
upon one's love. A latent sense of moral propriety 
is deadened when reverent speech, look, attitudes, 



PRESUMPTION IN THE WORSHIP OF GOD. 83 

are expressed around one who gazes in stolid va- 
cuity of thought and torpor of feeling. A delicate 
sense of moral beauty is drugged by the hearing 
of holy song to which the heart is apathetic. Men 
rarely appreciate how fearfully they debase and 
deform the most godlike faculties of their being, 
by the quickly growing habit of unresponsive 
listening to the services of God's house. 

There is an insidious disease which slowly and 
secretly turns vital organs of the body to bone. 
It begins by ossifying little fragments of tissue 
here and there. No medical skill can arrest its 
progress. Nature is perverted from her healthy 
processes of assimilation and nutrition, to the crea- 
tion in the system of nothing but bone. What 
should be life to muscle and nerve and sinew and 
arteries, turns to solid and lifeless bone. At 
length the heart is reached, and vital parts of it 
become bone, and its beautiful work of pulsation, 
by which life is sent in red streams to the very 
tips of the fingers, ceases, and death ensues. Such 
is the moral induration which the sensibilities of a 
soul suffer, when long appealed to by the services 
of religion, to which it will not give back a throb 
of responsive feeling. . Ossification of heart may 
have a double meaning. 

3. Presumption in worship may take the form 
of frequenting the house of God as a place of enter- 
tainment merely. " Thou art to them as a very 
lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and 



84 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

can play well on an instrument ; for they hear thy 
words, and do them not." Thus the Lord said to 
the prophet Ezekiel; and it is a truthful record 
of the reception which multitudes give to faithful 
and eloquent preaching. Often the auditorium of 
God's house is turned end for end. It is not the 
pulpit, but the organ and the operatic quartette, 
which entertain the wondering listeners. 

In a certain church the most costly music that 
money can buy is furnished to the worshippers. 
The same "stars" appear there on Sunday that 
stood the evening before on the stage of the opera 
or the theatre. An entrance-fee is charged at the 
door. People flock thither as to a place of re- 
ligious entertainment. Many of them profess no 
other motive. The sermon, the prayer, the scrip- 
tural lesson, are but appendages to the perform- 
ances of the operatic troupe. Is that worship? 
Can God be pleased with it? "My house shall 
be called a house of prayer, but ye have made it 
a den of thieves." Is it any more a sin to sell a 
dove in the temple than to sell a song ? The only 
instance in which our Lord gave way to violence 
in his holy indignation was at the sight of the 
desecration of the sanctuary. Would he not find 
use for the whip of small cords if he should wan- 
der into certain churches in our day ? 

4. We are guilty of presumptuous sin in wor- 
ship, if we endeavor to conceal from ourselves 
hidden sin under cover of scrupulous devotion. In 



PRESUMPTION IN THE WORSHIP OF GOD. 85 

the time of the judges of Israel there lived a man, 
Micah by name, who stole eleven hundred shekels 
of silver. He built him an idol with a part of it, 
thus " consecrating it to the Lord " as he thought. 
He was an idolater and a thief. His conscience 
pricked him. So, to make every, thing sure, he 
hired a young Levite to be his household chaplain. 
" Now," said he, " the Lord will do me good, see- 
ing that I have a Levite to my priest." That 
was a semi-barbarous age. The trick of the thiev- 
ing rascal seems transparent. We marvel that 
even an old half-civilized Jew could juggle him- 
self with it. But are there no such self-cheated 
worshippers in our times ? By more ingenious 
devices perhaps, and in more recondite twists of 
conscience, yet not a whit less impiously towards 
God, we may make our very fidelity to God's 
house, and the zeal of our worship, a cover to hid- 
den sin which we are not willing to abandon, and 
therefore not willing to see. 

A recent celebrated forger in New York was 
one of the most faithful attendants upon the wor- 
ship of a Christian sanctuary. For years, while 
he was setting his hand to the deeds for which he 
•now lies in the penitentiary, he was repeating 
every sabbath the prayers of an ancient church ; 
singing the songs which the voices of martyrs had 
hallowed ; giving freely of his stolen goods to the 
benevolences of God's people ; and, as he seems to 
have believed, loving rather to do deeds of charity 



86 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

than to hoard gold. It would be just like man, if 
that poor man really persuaded himself that his re- 
ligious devotions would somehow offset his crimes. 
Yes : that is man as he is by nature. Such are we 
all, but by the grace of God. Our very consciences 
become tortuous and serpentine under the wiles 
of sin, till we verily think we can mock God with 
impunity. Oh, how idiotic we become when we 
make Satan our ally ! 

5. We are guilty of presumptuous worship when 
ive offer to Grod services in which any essential truth 
of GrooTs being is denied or ignored. A celebrated 
preacher of " another gospel," recently deceased, 
has published as a part of the " truth as it is in 
Jesus," as he understood it, the following frag- 
ments : " I take not the Bible for my master, 
nor even Jesus of Nazareth. . . . He is my best 
historic ideal of human greatness; not without 
errors, and I presume of course not without sins. 
For men without sins exist in the dreams of girls. 
You and I never saw such a one, and we never 
shall." Let us think kindly of the erring one who 
has gone to a world where the " Lamb that was 
slain " sits as judge of the living and the dead. 
He has discovered before this time who and what 
the Lord Jesus Christ is. He has learned what 
that means, " Who is the brightness of his glory 
and the express image of his person." But can 
God ever have been pleased with worship which 
denied his triune being; with prayer which as- 






PRESUMPTION IN THE WORSHIP OF GOD. 87 

sumed that the Lord of glory was a sinner ; with 
songs of praise in which the claims of Him who 
" was with God, and was God," were ignored ? 
. How God will deal in eternity with honest in- 
fidelity, if there be such a thing in the strictest and 
final analysis of the human heart, we may safely 
leave to him. I do not know, and do not wish to 
know. But it becomes us who believe with all 
our souls that Jesus Christ is indeed the Lord of 
glory, " very God of very God," and that in him 
we have an infinite and eternal and sinless Saviour, 
to beware how we offer, or seem to offer, worship 
which denies him his place on the throne of the 
universe. The place of worship where he is thus 
denied is no place for us. Prayer offered other- 
wise than in his name is not prayer to us. What- 
ever it may be to those who honestly offer it, to us 
it cannot be worship of the true God. We kindle 
unhallowed fire on a strange altar if we thus seek 
communion with the Most High. Our fellowship 
is with the Father and his Son Jesus Christ. 

Even in our own usages of prayer, and in our 
own sanctuaries, we need to be most watchful of 
our moods, lest we pray as a regenerate heathen 
might pray, who had never heard of Christ; as 
Socrates and Plato, for aught we know, may 
have prayed; with no hearty recognition of the 
merits of Christ as our only ground of approach 
to the throne of grace. A redeemed sinner, who 
believes that he is redeemed, who knows that he 



88 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

has been bought with the precious blood of Christ, 
commits an act of fearful presumption if he ever 
lapses into what may, for distinction's sake, be 
called unchristian prayer. In what other form 
more insolent to the most high God can he take 
God's name in vain ? 






FIDELITY TO THE RELIGION OF A GODLY 
ANCESTRY. 

And the Lord was with Jehoshaphat, because he walked in 
the ways of his father David, and sought not unto Baalim; hut 
sought to the Lord God of his father, and walked in his com- 
mandments. . . . Therefore the Lord stablished the kingdom in 
his hand; . . . and he had riches and honor in abundance. — 
2 Chkon. xvii. 3-5. 

KING JEHOSHAPHAT was the son of a 
pious father. The chief fact about him 
which the Bible emphasizes is, that he was faithful 
to that father's instructions, and followed his ex- 
ample. " He sought to the Lord God of his father, 
and walked in his commandments." He was also 
the child of other godly ancestors, going far back 
to the beginning of the royal line. " God was 
with Jehoshaphat, because he walked in the first 
ways of his father David." 

In the religion of the Old Testament, much is 
made of family descent. A favorite title, by 
which God declared himself to his ancient people, 
was, " The God of thy fathers." Moses at the 
Red Sea sang, " The Lord is my father's God, 
and I will exalt him." King Hezekiah made it 
his plea for the pardon of his people : " The good 

89 



90 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Lord pardon every one that prepareth his heart to 
seek the Lord God of his fathers." Daniel prays, 
" I thank thee, O thou God of my fathers." Solo- 
mon at the dedication of the temple prays, " The 
Lord our God be with us as he was with our 
fathers." Moses, predicting the calamities which 
should come upon the nation in the distant fu- 
ture, imagines the lookers-on as asking, " What 
meaneth the heat of this great anger ? " And he 
replies, " Men shall say, Because they have for- 
saken the covenant of the Lord God of their 
fathers." 

Yes, in the theory of religion and its blessings 
in the Old Testament, the glory of the children is 
their fathers. One topic suggested by the present 
lesson is that of fidelity to the faith and example of 
a pious ancestry. Observe : — 

1. It is an unspeakable blessing to have been born 
in the line of a Christian parentage. "What lan- 
guage can express the thanksgivings of thousands 
of us for our Christian mothers ? Do not many of 
us owe as much to the firmness and the prayers 
of Christian fathers? How many of us could 
have borne, without a wreck of character, the 
temptations of early youth, but for the hallowed 
restraints of a Christian home? The voice of 
family prayer is that of a guardian angel in a 
multitude of homes. 

Much more than godly instruction and exam- 
ple is involved in the blessing. By a mysterious 



FIDELITY TO RELIGION. 91 

law of God's government, tendencies to character 
spring from the line of natural descent. Quali- 
ties of mind, natural sensibilities, the fineness of 
conscience, the very make of the soul, in which 
the elements of voluntary character germinate, 
come to us by no choice of ours. It is a great 
thing to have had that fountain of our moral being 
purified and vitalized by the grace of God. 

The purest blood this world has ever known is 
that of a Christian ancestry. It outranks all 
other aristocracies. Descent from kings and em- 
perors bears no comparison with it. Yes, William 
Cowper, thou art right : — 

"My boast is not that I deduce my birth 
From loins enthroned, the rulers of the earth; 
But higher far my proud pretensions rise, — 
The son of parents passed into the skies." 

The length of the line of Christian inheritance 
is in many cases a reduplication of the blessing. 
Blessed above princes of the blood royal is a 
fellow-townsman of mine, who is the descendant, 
in the eighth generation, from a well-known Eng- 
lish martyr, and the golden cord of whose godly 
heritage has never once in all that time been 
broken. 

It is an impressive thought, what an accumula- 
tion of prayer surrounds an infant at its birth in 
such a line ! It was a favorite habit of the Pil- 
grim Fathers, to pray for their posterity to the end 



92 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

of time. If "their angels do always behold the 
face of my Father which is in heaven," a convoy 
of angels must herald the advent of such an infant 
upon its earthly career. What a different thing is 
the probation of such a child from that of one 
who bears in his very blood the virus of a dozen 
generations of vice and pollution ! 

Probably in no other nation on the globe are 
there so many as in our own of such Christian 
families, who trace back their lineage through 
centuries of prayer and godly living. Says a 
historian of the early settlement of this country, 
" God sifted three kingdoms, that he might send 
choice spirits to people this continent." Many of 
us are living in grooves of spiritual blessing, fixed 
by answered prayer a thousand years before we 
were born. An eminent Christian of my acquaint- 
ance used to thank God daily for concealed bless- 
ings. Chief among such secret gifts is the shadowy 
hand of godly ancestors, stretched forth across the 
ages in benediction on our heads. 

2. The religion of our fathers, because it is such, 
has a strong presumptive claim upon our faith. The 
presumption may be balanced by opposing evi- 
dence ; but, till it is thus neutralized, it exists in 
the case of every man. It is no dishonor to a 
young man to believe in the religion of his father. 
It shows no want of independence to be a Chris- 
tian because one's father was a Christian. To 
believe as my father believed, to trust the faitJi 



FIDELITY TO RELIGION. 93 

which my mother sang to me, to cling to the 
Christian hopes which first bloomed at the fireside 
of my childhood's home, to rest in my inherited 
religion, and follow the example of my godly 
parents, is no nnmanly thing. God forbid that I 
should glory in breaking loose from such sacred 
ties ! Said a clergyman of my acquaintance, " I 
have been young, and now am old, and I have 
spent my life in the study of the religions of the 
world ; but I have yet to find a stronger proof of 
the truth of the Christian Scriptures than I dis- 
covered forty years ago in the character and life 
of my father and mother." 

That pride of intellect which a young man some- 
times feels, which makes him think that nothing 
in religious faith can be settled by the past, that 
he must therefore inquire de novo, as if no expe- 
rience had taught his ancestry any thing, is a very 
weak and narrow affection of the brain. No gen- 
eration exists, in God's plan, for nothing. Every 
generation of Christian believers adds something 
to the reasonable faith of the world in Christ, as 
truly as every generation of astronomers furnishes 
data for the calculations of astronomers who fol- 
low them. I have no more reason for rejecting the 
Christian faith of my father because I have not 
investigated every thing about it, than I have for 
going back to the Ptolemaic theory of the stars 
because I am not an expert in the Copernican 
astronomy. 



94 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

3. It is one of the divine laws of the increase of 
the Church, that the children of Christian parents 
should themselves be Christians. The conversion 
of this world to Christ is not to be brought about 
by revivals of religion alone. There are laws of 
grace as well as laws of nature. There is a law 
of Christian nurture, by which, through the grace 
of God, every Christian family becomes a nursery 
of the Church of Christ. Such is God's obvious 
design. Character is not transferable from father 
to son, but the elements out of which character 
grows are so. Religion once rooted in a Christian 
family should achieve so much conservation of 
Christian forces. A moral dike is thus built up 
against the floods of depravity, behind which 
children may be safe, as Holland is from the 
inroads of the sea. 

There is no good reason why our children should 
not grow up into Christian faith, instead of being 
wrenched into it by moral convulsions after years 
of riot in depravity. Plant an acorn anywhere, 
and anyhow, in good soil, and it will grow upward, 
and not downward. By the law of its being it 
seeks the sun. So a child set in the groundwork 
of a Christian household, and nurtured in its holy 
light and atmosphere, should by the very condi- 
tions of his existence grow up towards God and 
heaven. 

Many do thus grow up Christians. Many Chris- 
tian men and women cannot remember the day 



FIDELITY TO RELIGION. 95 

when they did not love God and trust in Christ. 
A Christian childhood may be reasonably expected 
to be free from flagrant vices. The very birth- 
hour may be the hour of holy regeneration. Chris- 
tian training may be the medium of sanctifying 
grace. By this law of religious nurture, as well 
as by that of great awakenings from a godless 
life, it is God's design that the Church shall grow, 
till it covers all the families of the redeemed. 
One such family is in God's plan the fountain of 
a pure stream which is to widen and deepen till it 
flows in holy majesty into eternity. 

4. The imitation of a godly ancestry is peculiarly 
pleasing to God. It is everywhere so represented 
in the Scriptures. Says St. Paul to Timothy, " I 
thank God when I call to remembrance the un- 
feigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in 
thy grandmother Lois and thy mother Eunice." 
The transmission of godliness to the third genera- 
tion is here the theme of thanksgiving. 

God is pleased with honor paid to his own laws. 
When he has given to a young man the inestimable 
blessing of a Christian parentage, he looks to see 
the blessing recognized. It is a joy to Christ to 
see a youth treading in the steps of a Christian 
father, and praying to old age the prayers taught 
by a Christian mother. Such a life honors God's 
mode of procedure. It is the supreme form of 
obedience to parents, with which God is well 
pleased. When Christian living follows a long 



96 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

line of godly progenitors running back through 
centuries of grace, there is an accumulation of 
glory to the gracious plans of God which cannot 
but be a joy to him. 

5. It is an act of signal and relentless guilt, to 
break the line of a pious heritage by a godless life. 
It involves a terrific contest with God for the 
damnation of the soul. Tough is the task which 
such a young man sets himself, to destroy his soul. 
He must do it fighting against the most potent de- 
vices of God for his salvation. Father's counsels, 
mother's prayers, godly example, the indefinable 
atmosphere, like to none other, of a Christian 
home, the holy momentum from a long procession 
of Christian forefathers, going back, it may be, 
into unknown history, must be persistently, in dead 
earnest, insolently, contended with and defied. 

That is a conflict more sanguinary, and of more 
woful issue, than any ever fought with sword or 
cannon on sea or land. A tripled and quadrupled 
cordon of spiritual influences must be charged and 
broken through. Such forces are never overcome 
but by the aid of opposing forces from the powers 
of darkness. Such a one must achieve his destruc- 
tion by inviting Satan into alliance. He must throw 
himself into the embrace of malignant auxiliaries. 
It is as if he cried out from within the reserved 
enclosure in which God has sought to protect him, 
" Come and help me to withstand God ! " Oh ! it 
is the saddest sight that angels ever look upon, 



FIDELITY TO RELIGION. 97 

when the child of a godly ancestry forces his way 
to hell over trampled prayers, and mangled forms 
of fathers and mothers extending back in the 
shadowy past perhaps a thousand years. 

Of the eminent men in American history, no 
one has come to the close of life under a darker 
cloud of reprobation from God and man than 
Aaron Burr. He was the son of parents eminent 
for piety. His father was the venerable president 
of a Christian college. His mother was the daugh- 
ter of the Rev. President Edwards, a most godly 
man, and herself also a woman renowned for her 
rare Christian culture. The family extended far 
back in a luminous pathway of Christian faith and 
prayer. What an accumulation of holy forces was 
concentrated upon Aaron Burr's boyhood and early 
manhood ! They surrounded him in no hard, re- 
pellant forms, but in the genial graces and beau- 
tiful adornments of educated Christian society. 
The piety of his father was lighted up by a mirth- 
ful humor. No happier men ever lived than the 
clergy of that age. The best education of the 
times, too, was his. Thus directed, so far as home 
and inheritance and circumstance could do it, thus 
directed toward heaven, he entered on his active 
manhood. 

When approaching his twentieth year, he be- 
came interested in the salvation of his soul. The 
Spirit of God then clearly set before him the great 
alternative, and pressed his decision on the side of 



98 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

virtue and religion. He retired for some weeks to 
a rural town in Connecticut, for the sake of set- 
tling once for all the question of his religious 
character. Nobody knows what was the history 
of those critical weeks, — through what conflicts 
he passed, how near he may have approached to 
the God of his fathers, nor what fatal influences 
turned him back. But he came home resolved, 
as he said, " never again to trouble himself about 
his soul's salvation." 

To all appearance he kept that resolution to the 
last. The die was cast, as he meant it should be, 
" once for all." It is not known that he was ever 
again seriously disturbed by religious convictions. 
He entered on what promised to be a brilliant 
public career, without God and without hope. He 
passed through it a godless man. He ended it 
disappointed in his ambitions, and soured against 
all the world. He died in obscurity, abandoned 
by old friends for years before, unsaluted by them 
as they passed him in the street, with the guilt of 
murder on his soul, and the brand of Cain on his 
brow. So far as man can know, he went speech- 
less into eternity, with a seared conscience and a 
hardened heart. God suffered him, as he generally 
does suffer such men, to die as he had lived. 

His was a representative history, — representa- 
tive of those who break the line of ancestral piety, 
and force their way to an irreligious life and death, 
in defiance of God's protective plans for their sal- 



FIDELITY TO RELIGION. 99 

vation. It is an appalling question — do not angels 
pause, and " lean on their harps " to catch the an- 
swer ? — " Who, are the Aaron Burrs now living in 
Christian families ? " 



THE LOST SON OF A GODLY FATHER. 

The Lord brought Judah low because of Ahaz Mug of Israel. 
Aud iu the time of his distress did he trespass yet more against 
the Lord. This is that king Ahaz. . . . He said, Because 
the gods of the kings of Syria help them, therefore will I sacri- 
fice to them, that they may help me. But they were the ruin of 
him. . . . And in every several city of Judah he made high 
places to burn incense unto other gods, and provoked to anger 
the Lord God of his fathers. —2 Chron. xxviii. 19, 22, 23, 25. 

"TTTHEREFOEE do the wicked live ? " Some 
V V wicked men are among the most useful 
of mankind. Certain poisons medical science uses 
to fight certain diseases which yield to no other 
remedy. So certain examples of iniquity may be 
transformed by the grace of God into remedial 
forces, by the contrast they furnish to the virtues, 
and the wisdom they teach to observers. 

King Ahaz is one of the stupendous monuments 
of guilt in Israelitish history. He is one of the 
few men in any history of whom not one good 
thing is recorded. His career was one uniform 
and unmitigated stream of iniquity from begin- 
ning to end. Not one virtue or virtuous act is 
thought worthy of mention in his whole life. So 
black and disgraceful was his reign, that when he 

100 



THE LOST SON OF A GODLY FATHER. 101 

died, the indignant and revolted conscience of the 
nation refused him burial in the royal sepulchre. 

Let us inquire what lessons may be learned from 
the life of such a supreme model of depravity. 

1. His career illustrates that law of character by 
which the wickedness of a man is proportioned to 
the amount of holy influence which he has conquered. 
We find a reason for his extreme depravity in the 
extreme facilities which he had for being a saint. 
He was the son of a godly father. His youth was 
passed under the restraints of holy example. He 
was one in a royal line which had been distin- 
guished for examples of illustrious piety. He had 
good blood. He came from good stock. He knew 
that he alone, of all the monarchs of the world, 
held his crown and kingdom by divine right as 
king of God's chosen people. He knew that a 
splendid history lay behind him, and that a more 
splendid future was before him. In the line of 
regal descent, in which he was a connecting link, 
One was to appear in whom all the nations of the 
world were to be blessed. That ancient promise 
of God to Abraham spanned like a rainbow the 
royal family of Judah. Mysterious as its meaning 
was, it must have been a power of moral restraint 
and moral stimulus to a man called of God to sit 
on the throne of Judah. 

Said a French monarch, when once solicited to 
consent to a dishonorable treaty, " The blood of 
Charlemagne is in my veins ; and who dares to 



102 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

propose this thing to me ? " The sense of honor- 
able inheritance must have been a moral power of 
immense significance to a monarch who stood in a 
line of theocratic princes. And it was not frit- 
tered away and lost in the mere sense of chivalry : 
it was a direct and potent help to holy living 
before God. Such a combination of holy influ- 
ence this Judsean king broke through ; and there- 
fore he became the man he was. The depth of his 
fall was proportioned to the momentum acquired 
in bursting the bonds which held him. 

Such is the natural working of things in the 
experience of sin. It is a fundamental law of 
character. As virtue is proportioned in vigor to 
the temptations resisted, so depravity is propor- 
tioned to the forces of conscience and inheritance 
and education and example and persuasion, and 
the Spirit of God, which have been fought with 
and conquered. This must always be reckoned in 
forecasting a man's future in a career of sin. The 
best things perverted are the worst. Christian 
birth abused becomes a curse. Religious educa- 
tion trampled on becomes a fountain of moral 
disease. Sabbaths broken become an opportunity 
to vice. Natural sensibilities to religion, indurated 
by transgression, become a foundation for towering 
iniquity. Convictions of sin resisted are often 
transformed into beliefs of falsehood. The striv- 
ings of the Holy Spirit quenched become the 
basis of satanic conquest. Devils fill the place 
from which the Spirit of God has been ejected. 



THE LOST SON OF A GODLY FATHER. 103 

It used to be proverbial in the days of American 
slavery, that the most ferocious overseers were 
Northern men who had to override the convictions 
of their youth and their inherited faith in order to 
become slave-drivers. This was one variety of the 
universal law which governs the degree of charac- 
ter, good or bad. Tell me what good influence 
a man has defied and scorned in becoming what 
he is, and I will give you the gauge of his de- 
pravity. The worst of men are apostates from the 
best of faiths. 

2. The career of this apostate prince illustrates 
also the faithfulness of God in chastising wicked 
men for their good. " The Lord brought Judah 
low because of Ahaz." From the beginning to 
the end of his reign, he experienced the truth 
that the way of transgressors is hard. In war he 
was whipped all around. In alliances he was 
cheated and checkmated. His people were made 
captives by thousands. Nothing went well with 
him. His public life was one long career of de- 
fying God, yet of God's persistent efforts to save 
him by chastising him. 

This is repeated over and over again in the ex- 
perience of wicked men. Such men often think it 
a great mystery that they suffer so much. They 
do not understand why it is that misfortune pur- 
sues them so. " Just my luck," says one, when ill 
success attends his business. Yet often the secret 
reason is that God is trying to save the man. He 



104 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

is contending with God in one way, and God is 
contending with him in another. There is no 
luck about it. It is God's faithfulness to the soul, 
at the expense of the pocket. 

" It is a great mystery ; I do not understand it : , 
it is unjust," says an ungodly man whom disease 
lays low, perhaps just on the eve of splendid suc- 
cesses. The cup is dashed from his lips, just when 
he is best able to enjoy it. Ill health follows him 
perhaps till he is glad to find such rest as he can 
in the grave. Often it is no mystery. It is God's 
striving to save the man. It is God's faithfulness 
to his soul, at the cost of his body. Somebody's 
prayers are answered in his afflictions. 

In one of the works of a popular author of fic- 
tion, a wicked man, engaged in a wicked business, 
is represented as scolding and swearing at and 
beating his Christian wife, because she persists — 
poor soul ! — in praying for him. He protests that 
she shall stop praying, or he must stop his busi- 
ness. Both cannot go on together: one or the 
other must give way. He thinks he has tried it, 
and found it so. The fancy is often true to fact. 
Often prayer cannot be answered except by chas- 
tising a man. He must be whipped out of his 
sins, or he never can be a happy man. This is the 
secret of the misfortunes of many an ungodly man. 

The sufferings of this world are not in the strict 
sense retributive. They are disciplinary. The 
world of retribution lies farther on. In love, God 



THE LOST SON OF A GODLY FATHER. 105 

holds the rod over many a bad man. He strikes 
him here, and he strikes him there. God's flail 
threshes him like wheat. He surrounds him with 
trouble. He heaps up misfortunes. They come 
thick and fast. Life is one long disappointment. 
" Few and evil have my days been," is his lament 
as he looks backward : " all is vanity and vexation 
of spirit." Is not this the general feeling with 
which men reach old age without the consolations 
of religion ? " Oh that I had never been born ! " 
exclaimed Voltaire in his old age. But in this 
experience of the wicked, God is never vindictive. 
This is his way of striving to save men from eter- 
nal death. Sometimes he pursues it to the very 
last, till the grave closes over the incorrigible 
sinner, and he passes on to a world where the 
retributive decisions of eternity displace the be- 
nign discipline of time. 

3. The life of this depraved prince illustrates 
further the extreme which sin reaches when men fight 
successfully against G-ocfs chastisements. " In the 
time of his distress did he trespass yet more against 
the Lord." This is the fearful phenomenon some- 
times witnessed in the developments of sin in this 
world. Some men are not subdued by suffering. 
They refuse to bow to chastisement. The more 
they suffer, the more they sin. Trouble angers 
them against God. They indicate their growing 
fitness for the world of woe in this induration of 
heart by which susceptibility to the softening 



106 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

effect of sorrow is destroyed. Sometimes this 
phenomenon is witnessed on a large scale. Times 
of pestilence are proverbially times of unusual 
wickedness in great cities. The plague in London 
developed the vices of the metropolis frightfully. 
Men patrolled the streets singing ribald songs 
beside the dead-cart. In the peril of shipwreck, 
two classes of sufferers are often observed, — those 
whom the peril subdues to prayer, and those whom 
it drives to the rum-bottle. 

When the Pemberton Factory fell, two classes 
of sufferers were crushed under the ruins, and 
two sets of voices came forth from the smoke 
and flame. The favorite hymns of the Methodist 
Church from the one drowned the curses and im- 
precations from the other. Thus the two went up 
on those wings of fire to meet God. How like to 
the contrast of the two crucified thieves ! " Lord, 
remember me ; " and, " If thou be the Christ, save 
thyself and us." 

Few things are so truthful a touchstone to the 
character of men as the way in which they treat 
the suffering which God sends as chastisement. 
One man turns at its bidding, and becomes an 
heir of glory: another defies it, and becomes a 
monument of perdition. Lord, who maketh us to 
differ ? 

4. The reign of this wicked monarch illustrates 
the disappointments which wicked men experience in 
their hopes of happiness in sin. The historian 



THE LOST SON OF A GODLY FATHER. 107 

relates of him : " He said, Because the gods of the 
kings of Syria help them, therefore will I sacrifice 
to them, that they may help me. But they were 
the ruin of him'' True to the life, every word of 
it ! In no more truthful figure can we express the 
experience of many young men who enter on a 
career of worldliness. They see other men living 
for this world alone, as it seems to a looker-on, on 
the top of the wave of human felicity. A rich 
man seems to them a supremely happy man. A 
successful statesman appears to have all that an 
aspiring man can ask for. A man who has gained 
the summit of social rank and splendor becomes, 
to many who are below him, the model of earthly 
bliss. Any man at the top of the ladder seems 
very high up to a man at the bottom. So a young 
man is -apt to look on the world to which he pro- 
poses to devote his being. "The world makes 
these men happy," he says ; "and I will try it, that 
it may make me happy too." This is the secret 
experience, probably, of all who give themselves 
deliberately to a life of irreligion. They are 
allured by the glamour of irreligious prosperity. 

But, when they try the experiment for them- 
selves, " it is the ruin of them." The fruit turns 
to ashes. No such young man ever finds the 
world to be what it looked to be when he surveyed 
it from afar. It is a beautiful mirage. The testi- 
mony of experience is proverbial, that the richest 
men are not the happiest men. The most success- 



108 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

ful ambitions men are not the happiest men. The 
pleasure-seekers who seem to have their fill of all 
they planned for in life are not the happiest men. 
One word expresses the issue of all such experi- 
ments, — disappointment. This world is full of 
soured and disappointed men. The more irreli- 
gious men are, the more profoundly they experi- 
ence this inward consciousness of failure in their 
life's plans. They have " hewed out to themselves 
broken cisterns that can hold no water." 

In one of Hawthorne's thrillingly fearful fictions, 
he represents a wretched man going about with a 
serpent in his bosom. Every now and then he 
clutches at his breast with his fingers, crying, " It 
gnaws me ; it gnaws me ! " As he walks the streets 
among his kind, he thinks he finds that every 
man he meets is cursed with the same snaky guest 
in his bosom. Each man at intervals seems to 
thrust his hand up to throttle the reptile. All 
alike are doomed to the hideous companionship. 
" It gnaws me ; it gnaws me ! " is the universal 
confession. The whole world seems to his crazed 
fancy to be at the mercy of vipers, each man 
warming and cherishing his own. 

Such a world is any world of beings given over 
to seeking happiness in itself. Such is this world, 
except as its fearful consciousness is relieved by 
the grace of God. Such is self in any man or 
woman, when turned away from God and turned 
inward. No flagrant crimes like those of the 



THE LOST SON OF A GODLY FATHER. 109 

Judaean king are necessary to reduce a man to this 
condition of inward and conscious curse. Perjury, 
arson, murder, are not the only nor the most com- 
mon precursors of such a doom. A man has only 
to abandon God, and live to himself, and he is as 
sure of it as Judas. Such a man may sit on the 
throne of the Cassars, or revel in the wealth of " far- 
thest Ind ; " yet he carries the snake in his bosom. 
In his honest hours, when he confesses the truth 
to his own soul, his ghastly soliloquy is, " It gnaws 
me ; it gnaws me ! " 

5. The career of this wretched prince illustrates 
the distinction which it is possible for a man to gain 
in this world as a monument of guilt. "He did 
trespass more against the Lord. This is that king 
Ahaz!" Such is the reflection of the annalist, 
after enumerating the monarch's crimes. " This is 
that king Ahaz. Look at him ; mark him ! let him 
stand in history as a monster of iniquity ; let the 
world stand aghast at him." Such seems to be 
the spirit of the inspired recorder. We all natu- 
rally crave distinction, — one man for one thing, 
another for another : all hanker for it in something. 
Any thing to lift us up and out of the common 
herd ! This is the temper of a world without God. 
It is possible for a man of reckless impiety to be*- 
come illustrious for guilt, and that only. Some 
such names stand out in history, and will stand 
thus forever. Where all are sinners, some become 
guilty above their fellows, — princes in depravity ; 



110 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

royal dukes in iniquity ; men so like to Satan in 
character, that he dwells with and takes possession 
of them before the time. 

This, I repeat, is possible to any man. It re- 
quires no great genius or invention. A man need 
not travel far and explore distant seas to gain the 
means of this hideous renown. It requires only 
a strong, persistent, and selfish will, determined to 
fight God. This is the natural drift of sin. What 
a scaffold is among human punishments, what hy- 
drophobia is among deadly diseases, such may a 
man become among his fellow-sinners, by simply 
giving himself to himself, and defying the rights 
of God. 

This is the legitimate ending of a long career 
of alternate chastisement and sin without repent- 
ance. A Cornish proverb says, " He that will not 
be ruled by the rudder must fee ruled by the 
rock." This is the rock on which haughty and 
defiant guilt is wrecked. It is simply left to itself, 
to become what it has chosen to be, — such a de- 
mon of iniquity as to be abhorred of God and man. 
God save us from ourselves ! We carry within 
us the elements of hell, if we but choose to make 
them such. Ahaz, Judas, Nero, Borgia, Alva, — 
all were once prattling infants in happy mothers' 
arms. The first babe of our race — a marvel of 
joy to the first" mother — was the first murderer. 
Who shall dare to encounter the possibilities of 
human guilt, without the grace of God ? 



THE GODLY SON OF AN UNGODLY FATHER. 

Hezekiah . . . did that which was right in the sight of the 
Lord, according to all that David his father had done. Thus did 
Hezekiah . . . and wrought that which was good and right and 
truth before the Lord his God. And in every work that he be- 
gan in the service of the house of God, and in the law, and in 
the commandments, to seek his God, he did it with all his heart, 
and prospered." — 2 Chkon. xxix. 1, 2, xxxi. 20, 21. 

ONE human life illustrates the whole govern- 
ment of God. We live under such overshad- 
owings of God's purposes, that at every turn we 
come upon something which shows forth principles 
which are eternal. Truth is indeed stranger than 
fiction. Romance cannot equal the grandeur 
which every human life, if read aright, discloses. 
Hence it is that the Bible is made up so largely of 
fragments of biography. 

1. Studying the life and reign of Hezekiah, we 
discover, among other things, that he is an illustra- 
tion of the sovereignty of God in conversion. He 
was one of the model princes of Judah. Yet early 
in his life his conversion was one of the most im- 
probable of events. He was the son of one of the 
most impious monarchs that ever sat on the throne 
of Israel. Bad blood was in his veins. His youth 

in 



112 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

was cursed by a most polluted pareutal example. 
The abominations of Oriental idolatry were the 
atmosphere of his childhood. Not in the retire- 
ment of a private home, surrounded by better 
homes, did he live, but among the splendid cor- 
ruptions of a court which set the current of pop- 
ular opinion, and defiled the whole kingdom. No 
other spot on earth is so fatal to youthful inno- 
cence as a corrupt court. Yet there this heir to 
the throne was born and bred. Parental and royal 
example combined to make him a bad man and a 
worse king. 

It is the mysterious lot of many other men, to 
be born and educated under circumstances which 
render their conversion to God intrinsically im- 
probable. They seem born to vice. They are 
trained to immorality. Childish and even infan- 
tile lips are taught to profane God's name. This 
is not always the lot of the poor and the ignorant 
only. It was the favorite pastime of one of the 
statesmen of the first period of our Republic, to 
teach his beautiful little motherless daughter at 
four years of age to prattle the oaths with which 
his own conversation was polluted. It is one of 
the unsolved mysteries of God's government, that 
such enormities are permitted. Humming-birds 
seem to have a more blessed existence than the 
children of such impious fathers and mothers. 

Yet God often enters such homes with his sav- 
ing grace. He speaks the word, " Thou art mine," 



THE GODLY SON OF AN UNGODLY FATHER. 113 

and a child of immortality is saved. Christ is 
swift to take such a little one in his arms, and 
bless it ; and it becomes an heir of glory. It is 
like God to do sovereign things. Therefore it 
is like God to do things which to human view 
seem to border on the impossible. 

2. The conversion of Hezekiah, therefore, should 
give encouragement to the children of unchristian 
parents. So much is often said, and justly, of the 
covenant of God with Christian parents, that 
sometimes in the contrast a cloud seems to rest 
over the destiny of those who do not share that 
blessing. Said one child of vice, "My father 
was a drunkard, and my grandfather was a drunk- 
ard before him ; I shall be a drunkard too ; we 
belong to a race of drunkards. I may as well 
accept my lot first as last : it is my fate." Said 
another, a man of high culture, but notorious for 
his ungoverned passions, " My father was just so : 
his boys are all so. We can't live in peace to- 
gether : we never did. We are all possessed of the 
devil : I can't help it." 

Not so does God reason. " All souls are mine," 
he declares. " The son shall not bear the iniquity 
of the father," is his law. " If he beget a son 
that seeth all his father's sins, and doeth not such 
like, he shall not die for the iniquity of his lather : 
he shall surely live. The soul that sinneth, it 
shall die." The principle of individual responsi- 
bility is most sacredly built into the foundations 



114 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT, 

of God's government. He never swerves from it 
the breadth of a hair. In this respect, every man, 
woman, and child on the globe stands alone before 
God, as if no other man, woman, child, had stood 
before them. Each one of us stands alone, — alone 
here, alone at the judgment, alone forever. Each 
sins alone, is judged alone, is saved or lost alone. 
The solitude in which every man dies is an em- 
blem of the individuality of his being forever. 

It is also the way of God to save men when to 
human view their salvation is incredible. He de- 
lights in miracles of grace. The early disciples 
could not believe that Saul of Tarsus was con- 
verted. It is not recorded that they had ever 
prayed for his conversion. That was the quickest 
way of putting an end to his persecution of them ; 
but it does not appear that they ever thought of 
it. But God was beforehand with them. Saul, 
before they knew it, was praying for them. God 
loves such paradoxes of grace. Unwritten biog- 
raphy is full of them. 

True, it is a great blessing to have been born in 
the line of a godly ancestry. But it is a greater 
blessing to have been born at all, under the grace 
of God, in a Christian land, amidst sabbaths, 
Bibles, churches, and under the gracious provi- 
dences of God. Some of the best of men have 
been illustrations of divine grace to the worst. 
What of heathen converts to Christianity? 
Heaven is already becoming populous with the 






THE GODLY SON OF AN UNGODLY FATHEB. 115 

children of idolaters, liars, drunkards, thieves, 
adulterers, murderers. Go back far enough in the 
ancestral line of any of us, and we come to a 
generation of cannibals. What but the love of 
God first took off that ancestral curse ? 
■ 3. The upright character of Hezekiah illustrates 
also that the conversion of men is often assisted hy 
their natural recoil from extreme wickedness. The 
young monarch must have come to the throne in 
a state of disgust with his father's crimes. He 
must have felt the dishonor of them to the royal 
name. He must have seen the wretched condition 
of the kingdom on account of them. His subse- 
quent life shows that as a young man he must have 
been thoughtful and of tender conscience. He 
was just the man to blush for his father's disgrace, 
and to recoil with a } r oung man's pride from his 
country's shame. This class of influences, under 
the grace of God, may have been the means of his 
salvation. It is noticeable that his reform was 
begun instantly on his accession to the kingdom. 
He lost no time. He was evidently prepared for 
his work by previous thought and resolution. 

This is one of the benevolent devices of God 
for the defeat of sin. Sin is often so used as to 
defeat itself. One of the reasons why it is per- 
mitted to run its course, and come to a head, is 
that men may see it in its hideous maturity. Only 
thus can we know it as it is. The delay of God 
in its punishment may be often due to this law. 
And it often works to the salvation of souls. 



116 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Even irreligious men are shocked by wickedness 
which exceeds their own. A young man's first 
knowledge of the world, when he goes out from 
the innocence of his childhood's home, often pro- 
duces a recoil from the world's depravity. He 
did not know before that sin was so vile a thing. 
He starts back from it, and begins to feel his need 
of prayer. Not long ago a young man who had 
just entered college wrote home to his father, say- 
ing, "I did not know how wicked young men 
could be till I came here. I shall not get through 
without a wreck unless I commit myself as a 
follower of Christ." From that time he conse- 
crated his life to God. God used the very enor- 
mities of sin to save him from sin. 

So the child of vicious parents is often saved 
from vice by his early knowledge of vice. Many 
a drunkard's child has never tasted a drop of in- 
toxicating drink. The Holy Spirit is ingenious in 
devising ways of alluring men to heaven. He 
draws men in backward in their recoil from hell. 
He uses sin to defeat sin. When a prairie is on 
fire, and the traveller is in danger of being sur- 
rounded and suffocated by the roaring flame, he 
has a way of fighting fire with fire. So the Spirit 
of God sets guilt against guilt. Temptation is 
checkmated by the very ghastliness of the crime 
which it proposes. 

The young should cherish, then, as for dear life, 
their first revolt of conscience from abounding sin. 



THE GODLY SON OP AN UNGODLY FATHER. 117 

The sensitiveness of a soul not yet inured to vice 
is the guard which God has given for its protec- 
tion. The backward spring from mature depravity 
is a token of moral health : it may be the prelude 
to the soul's conversion. 

Charles IX. of France, in his youth, had humane 
and tender sensibilities. The fiend who tempted 
him was the mother who had nursed him. When 
she first proposed to him the massacre of the Hu- 
guenots, he shrunk from it with horror : " No, no, 
madam ! they are my loving subjects." Then was 
the critical hour of his life. Had he cherished that 
natural sensitiveness to bloodshed, St. Bartholo- 
mew's Eve would never have disgraced the history 
of his kingdom, and he himself would have escaped 
the fearful remorse which crazed him on his death- 
bed. To his physician he said in his last hours, 
" Asleep or awake, I see the mangled forms of the 
Huguenots passing before me. They drip with 
blood. They make hideous faces at me. They 
point to their open wounds, and mock me. Oh 
that I had spared at least the little infants at the 
breast ! " Then he broke out in agonizing cries 
and screams. Bloody sweat oozed from the pores 
of his skin. He was one of the very few cases in 
history which confirm the possibility of the phe- 
nomenon which attended our Lord's ancmish in 
Gethsemane. That was the fruit of resisting, 
years before, the recoil of his youthful conscience 
from the extreme of guilt. 



118 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Our English word " remorse " comes from a 
Latin word which means " to bite back." Tender 
sensibilities trampled on in our youth grow rabid, 
like canine madness, and " bite back " upon the 
offender with a malignant venom which has no 
remedy. 

4. The narrative before us illustrates the fact 
that ivhen God converts men from amidst surround- 
ings of great depravity, he often has some great t and 
signal service for them to do for him. Such was the 
case with King Hezekiah. God summoned him to 
the reformation of a kingdom. He trained him 
for it by permitting him to see the guilt and the 
ruin of his father's reign. When the critical time 
came, he lifted him out of the slough of iniquity, 
and made him one of the signal examples of a 
godly prince, whose name should give lustre to 
the Jewish throne forever after. 

Thus God often works in humbler life. One of 
the most successful clergymen in the history of the 
New-England pulpit was the son of a drunkard 
and a thief. His youth was spent in extreme pov- 
erty and disgrace. The family name was a by- 
word. When he resolved to work his way to 
college and to the pulpit, his father overwhelmed 
him with parental curses. In that man's boyhood, 
his rum for this world and the next seemed to 
human view well-nigh certain. " Like father, like 
son," said his neighbors. But God had other plans 
for the unfortunate youth. That masterly pulpit 



THE GODLY SON OF AN UNGODLY FATHER. 119 

was preparing for him, and he preparing for it. 
The earthly father's curses and the heavenly Fa- 
ther's blessing were pitted against each other. 
God brought him safely through those fires of 
Moloch. He called him to stand in a place more 
honorable than the courts of kings. He became 
greatly successful in revivals of religion. Before 
his death, more than twelve hundred persons were 
known to him who attributed their conversion to 
his ministry. 

God knows where to find his chosen ones. He 
sees them from afar. They may be born in dens 
of vice, and nurtured in almshouses and attics and 
cellars. But He who was born in a manger has 
his eye upon them ; and he brings their feet out 
into a large place. They stand at last before 
kings. Their usefulness in the end is propor- 
tioned to the lowliness and the peril of their be- 
ginning. A popular writer of our own day says 
that it takes three generations to create a gentle- 
man. It takes not half of one to create a king who 
shall reign with Christ a thousand years. 

5. The work of King Hezekiah illustrates the 
moral power of one man in effecting a great work to 
which God has called him. From the narrative in 
the lesson it appears that the reformation of the 
kingdom was at first the idea of Hezekiah alone. 
" It is in my heart," he says, " to make a covenant 
with the Lord." Nobody seems to have put him 
up to it. No prophet came to warn or to stimulate 



120 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

him. The movement grew up silently in his own 
heart. God and he planned it alone. Probably 
he had been brooding over it and praying over it 
for years. Men do not spring into such honor at 
a bound. At last he was the soul of the reform. 
The idea was his ; the measures were his ; the ex- 
ecution was his. 

So it often is in other great works of God. 
Some one man heads it ; puts his soul into it ; 
gives his life to it ; rouses other men, and energizes 
them in it. There is almost no limit to the power 
of a live man called of God to a great life's work. 
Other men fall back to the right and to the left, 
and let such a man go up the highway of the King, 
while they fall in at the rear, and acknowledge his 
lead. 

In almost every group of Christian workers, 
some one such man is the confessed leader ; not 
the man that seeks leadership, but the man whom 
leadership seeks. Not great men and kings alone 
are thus exalted. God calls them from lowly 
places rather. Not many noble are called. The 
lives of such men as William Carey and Harlan 
Page are immortal witnesses to what one man can 
do, if he is roused by great ideas, filled with a 
great faith, endowed with a great soul, inspired 
by a great hope, and sets himself to work at God's 
bidding and in God's way. The secret leading of 
such men by the teachings of the Holy Spirit is 
akin to inspiration. They never lie in their pro- 
posals, and never fail in their achievements. 



THE GODLY SON OF AN UNGODLY FATHER. 121 

6. The work of King Hezekiah illustrates also 
the suddenness with which God often achieves by the 
hand of such men great changes in the progress of his 
kingdom. Following the story of this ancient re- 
formation, we learn at the end of the narrative that 
" Hezekiah rejoiced, and all the people, that God 
had prepared the people, for the thing was done sud- 
denly." It was an instance of a very rapid work 
of grace. Although the king had originated the 
movement, and set others to work out the idea 
over which he had long brooded, he found things 
ready to his hand. God had " prepared the peo- 
ple for it." They had been reading God's provi- 
dence, as well as he. Secret currents of feeling 
were swelling in their hearts. All that they 
needed was a leader. When, therefore, the leader 
appeared in the person of their youthful prince, 
events moved quickly. Results ripened fast. 
Before they had time to dally over it, the thing 
was done. The kingdom was righted, and brought 
once more into line in the service of the living 
God. 

This is another of the common laws of God's 
working. He prepares different agencies in differ- 
ent channels secretly. Each is quietly fitted to 
another by unseen strategy. The leader is fash- 
ioned for the people, and the people trained for 
the leader. Unknown to each other, men are set 
to thinkmg of the same thing. The same fire is 
kindled in many hearts; the same resolves are 



122 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

created, trie same hopes cherished. Perhaps no 
man knows the heart of his neighbor in the thing. 
Each man may think he is alone in it. Bnt by 
and by the time comes when things are ripe for 
a disclosure of God's plans. The leader appears, 
and unexpectedly finds that he has a large follow- 
ing. The people rise, and suddenly find that they 
have a born leader. Organization is easy. Every- 
body seems to have a mind for the work. The 
result is a great and sudden growth of Christ's 
kingdom. Revivals of religion have illustrated 
this law over and over again. The history of 
Christian missions is full of it. The abolition of 
American slavery illustrated it. How we used to 
talk and pray on that subject twenty years ago ! 
We thought it one of the far-distant events in our 
coming history. Centuries hence, in some golden 
age, we dreamed that some happy generation of 
our successors would arise, who would devise 
some way of putting an end to the atrocious sys- 
tem. Nobody conceived it possible that the end 
was so near, and would come so suddenly. But 
God was fitting events to events, and men to men. 
Had our spiritual senses been more alert, we 
should have heard the chariot-wheels and the 
tramping of steeds. At last, when he was ready, 
the end came in the twinkling of an eye. Such 
phenomena suggest the possibility that the conver- 
sion of the world may be nearer than we think. 



THE GODLY SON OF AN UNGODLY FATHER. 123 

Who knows? It would not be stranger than 
some things which God has done, if men now 
living should see this world consecrated to Jesus 
Christ. 






THE PRODIGAL SON OF GODLY PARENTS. 

And when he was in affliction, he besought the Lord his God, 
and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers, and 
prayed unto him; and he was entreated of him, and heard his 
supplication, and brought him again to Jerusalem into his king- 
dom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord he was God. — 2 
Chkon. xxxiii. 12, 13. 

FEW principles of the divine government are 
more vital to religion than those which gov- 
ern the transmission of tendencies to good and to 
evil in the line of family descent. In previous 
studies we have seen some varieties of them. We 
have observed a son faithful to the example of a 
godly father, in the case of Jehoshaphat; a son 
defying that example to the death, in the case of 
Ahaz ; and the son of a most impious father re- 
coiling to the service of God, in the person of 
Hezekiah. 

The life of King Manasseh illustrates another 
phase of the working of those principles. The re- 
markable distinction of his career is, that he is 
the only case clearly recorded in the Scriptures, of 
a youth breaking away from the restraints and ex- 
ample of a religious parentage, who was recovered 
by the grace of God, and brought to repentance. 

124 



THE PRODIGAL SON OF GODLY PARENTS. 125 

His life is the old story, — sin, chastisement, re- 
pentance, and forgiveness. "He did evil in the 
sight of the Lord; he made Judah to do worse 
than the heathen;" "Wherefore the Lord brought 
upon him the host of Assyria, which bound him in 
fetters, and carried him to Babylon;" "And w"hen 
he was in affliction, he humbled himself greatly 
before the God of his fathers;" "And he was 
entreated of him, and heard his supplication ; " 
"Then Manasseh knew that the Lord he was 
God." Guilt, suffering, penitence, pardon. The 
story of Juclah's prince is the story of to-day. 
Twenty-five hundred years have not changed its 
tenor, nor relaxed the principles of God's gov- 
ernment which it illustrates. 

1. It deserves to be noticed, that the fall of 
Manasseh was an exception to the general law respect- 
ing the history of children of a godly parentage. 
The charge has been exultingly used against the 
credit of religion, that the sons of Christian fathers 
are generally worse than others. The sons of 
bishops and clergymen and deacons and elders are 
often said to be proverbially wicked. The re- 
straints of a religious home are sometimes criticised 
as tending by re-action to the extremes of vice. 
This assertion is not true historically. Statistics 
disprove it. 

In a certain New-England town of some thou- 
sands of people, the records of the Christian fami- 
lies were once examined thoroughly to test this 



126 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

question. I am unable to recall the exact num- 
bers; but the proportion of the children of such 
families who became religious men and women, 
as related to those who did not, was more than 
five to one. Three or four such investigations 
have come within my knowledge, all ending in 
a similar result. In the Theological Seminary 
at Andover, some years ago, it was found, on in- 
quiry, that out of its hundred and twenty students 
preparing for the ministry of the gospel, more, than 
the hundred were from Christian homes, and 
more than twelve were sons of Christian ministers. 
A similar inquiry, with similar results, was once 
instituted in Amherst College. Had the common 
proverb on the subject been true, no such propor- 
tions as these would have been at all probable. 
The reverse should be the law : the Church should 
look for her clergy to families in which children 
have not the misfortune of religious restraints to 
lay the foundation for profane re-actions. 

The design of God in the constitution of the 
Christian family is to make it the fountain of 
all virtues, the very citadel of religion, and the 
nursery of the Church. The Church itself is but 
the family on an extended scale. In the long-run, 
and as a general rule, it works as God intended 
that it should work. The covenant of God with 
faithful parents is not dishonored. The Church 
owes to it a very large portion of her membership, 
and many of the most brilliant ornaments of her 



THE PRODIGAL SON OF GODLY PARENTS. 127 

pulpits. It is a fact which children in Christian 
households should ponder seriously, that, if they 
do break loose from the restraints of their reli- 
gious training, they become exceptional cases of sin 
against exceptional privilege. 

2. This is confirmed by the fact, which the 
early manhood of Manasseh also illustrates, that, 
when the children of the good become vicious, they do 
become worse than the average of wicked men. The 
brief records of Manasseh's reign clearly hint 
this. He fell back to the disgraceful level of his 
grandfather Ahaz. The catalogue of his crimes 
is fearful. " He made Judah to do worse than 
the heathen," says the historian. He practised 
sorcery and necromancy, and restored the furnace 
to Tophet. He worshipped the stars. He sacri- 
ficed his own children to pagan deities. He named 
his son Amon after an Egyptian idol. He was the 
first persecutor in Judah of the true religion. He 
removed the ark out of the holy of holies. Tra- 
dition says that the name of Jehovah was erased 
from all public documents and inscriptions. His 
reign was a "reign of terror " to the prophets of 
the Most High. The secular historian says that 
" day by day a fresh batch of the prophetic order 
were ordered to execution. From end to end of 
Jerusalem were to be seen traces of their blood." 
Tradition says that the prophet Isaiah, nearly 
ninety years of age, perished by Manasseh's order. 
Yet the same tradition declares that his mother 



128 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

was Isaiah's daughter. He was one of the three 
kings who in Jewish story had no part in the 
life to come, — Jeroboam, Ahab, Manasseh. His 
name became in Jewish annals the synonyme of 
infamy. 

This is an obviously natural working of things. 
A steel spring will recoil one way with a force 
proportioned to the power with which it has been 
bent the other way. A cannon-ball dropped from 
the summit o'f a shot-tower reduplicates its velo- 
city as it descends, and it strikes the earth with a 
concussion proportioned to the height of the tower. 
Similar is the law of character. Both virtue and 
depravity are in exact ratio to the resistance over- 
come. 

The child of godly parentage therefore, if he 
becomes an outcast, does fall lower than the aver- 
age of outcasts. In the natural course of things 
he becomes a more hardened sinner in the sight of 
God. His conscience suffers a more fatal violence. 
His subsequent conversion is less probable. Such 
is the law of natural progress in the evolution of 
character. This doubtless is the foundation of the 
proverb that the sons of ministers and elders and 
deacons generally become monuments of superla- 
tive vice. When they do so, they attract the atten- 
tion of observers by the very extreme of their 
wickedness and its contrast to the homes of their 
childhood. The child of godly progenitors can- 
not tamper with temptation without 












THE PRODIGAL SON OF GODLY PARENTS. 129 

greater peril of the loss of the soul than that in- 
curred by other men. Exalted to heaven in privi- 
lege, — thrust down to hell in guilt : such is the 
contrast as the Bible paints it. 

3. The fall of Manasseh illustrates a mysterious 
but undoubted fact respecting the law of heredi- 
tary descent as affecting character. It is that the 
virus of an evil parentage, when arrested in one gen- 
eration, may pass over, and re-appear in the genera- 
tion following. This youthful prince was the son 
of Hezekiah, one of the best of Judsean monarchs, 
but the grandson of Ahaz, one of the worst. 

Physicians tell us that there are certain heredi- 
tary diseases of which the inheritance is often 
intermittent. One generation may escape their 
fatal fangs, but they may appear in all their viru- 
lence in the generation next succeeding. Similar 
is the mystery of spiritual inheritance. The un- 
written history of families discloses the fact that 
sometimes the Christian son of an ungodly father 
had a most devout grandmother, whose prayers 
seem to be answered in his conversion. Her god- 
ly virtues seem to hold over, and re-appear in the 
persons of her grandchildren. 

By the same law, a vicious son of a Christian 
father will sometimes- be found to have sprung 
from a more vicious grandfather. The evil blood 
descends, like a subterranean rivulet, through the 
person of his own son, and comes to the surface 
again in the evil tendencies of the grandson. I 



130 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

would not probe irreverently nor to fanciful re- 
sults the mysteries of God's procedures. But 
these are facts sometimes seen in the character of 
the linked generations. God has deemed the prin- 
ciple they involve of sufficient importance to be 
affirmed imperatively in the third commandment 
of the Decalogue. King Manasseh's fall, there- 
fore, is to the point. Evil is tenacious of life. It 
intertwines itself around the roots of character. 
Tendencies to it, once created, run in the blood. 
We all suffer the curse of it from the fall of 
Adam. Not to the destruction or the lessening 
of individual responsibility — no, not by a hair- 
breadth. But it affects visibly the conditions of 
probation. 

The old English preachers used to make much 
of this law of the divine government. Moral in- 
heritance was to them a most stupendous and 
practical fact. Jeremy Taylor has somewhere 
recorded a prayer that God will purify the inher- 
ited fountain of evil in the soul, and turn back 
the current from rolling downward from the father 
to the son. To a thoughtful man, not unobserv- 
ant of the ways of God, this is a most appro- 
priate theme of secret prayer. If I am conscious 
of corrupt tendencies which have been a tempta- 
tion to me all my life, and which I know to have 
been felt and lamented, or perhaps not lamented, 
in the lives of my progenitors, why should I not 
pray, with the fervor of a father's solicitude for 



THE PRODIGAL SON OF GODLY PARENTS. 131 

the salvation of his offspring, that the accursed 
current may stop with me ? that by the grace of 
God it may not pass on, and deluge with tempta- 
tion the lives and souls of my children ? 

There are rivers which come down from the sum- 
mit of Oriental mountains swollen with freshets, 
and destructive to the tillage and pasturage of the 
valleys ; but, as they approach the sea, they are 
absorbed and lost in the sands of the desert. So 
may we pray that inherited proclivities to sin, to 
vice it may be, may be arrested in their cursed 
flow, and be lost forever from the line of the fam- 
ily in which we form a link, and are appointed to 
work out other destinies than our own. Every 
Christian parent may well pray, " Lord, visit not 
my sins and the sins of my fathers upon the chil- 
dren of the third and the fourth generations ! " 

4. The fall of this young monarch illustrates 
the power of high station and worldly prosperity to 
counteract the influence of a religious education. 
Manasseh had all that youthful ambition could 
desire, to make him in love with the world. His 
childhood was spent in anticipation of the most 
splendid position in the kingdom. He was heir to 
wealth and dignity and the alliances of kings. 
Courtiers nattered him. Young men felt them- 
selves honored by his friendship. Old men did 
him reverence as their future sovereign. The 
temptation overwhelmed him, and he fell before 
it. 



132 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

When the sons of godly parents go astray, it is 
found, more frequently than otherwise, that they 
fall before the enticements created by their fa- 
thers' wealth, and the ease and luxury with which 
wealth surrounds them. I ask the principal of a 
large academy, what is the chief cause of the ruin 
of boys from religious homes ; and he answers with- 
out a moment's hesitation, " Too much money." I 
ask the president of one of the largest colleges 
in New England, what is the surest protection to 
young men against the perils of college life ; and 
he responds, " Poverty." 

We know not what we ask when we pray for 
riches and worldly eminence for our children. 
Such prayers, answered as we wish, might just 
nullify our care for their religious culture, and 
make them the sorrow of our old age. Many a 
Christian father goes down to the grave, gray be- 
fore his time, mourning over the vices of children 
whose fall is due to the riches he has hoarded for 
them, and the social companionship to which it 
has been the ambition of his life to lift them. 
Many of us have yet to learn to live for our chil- 
dren on principles which recognize our own faith 
in the littleness of time and the magnitude of 
eternity. 

5. The misfortunes which followed the apostasy 
of Manasseh illustrate the faithfulness of Grod to 
his covenant with godly parents. It is noticeable 
that the chastisements inflicted upon the young 



THE PUODIGAL SON OF GODLY PARENTS. 133 

king were very severe. A tremendous downfall is 
that which precipitates a king from his throne to the 
dungeon of a foreign enemy. Few of the princes 
of Judah suffered that. But this one had been 
exceptionally wicked : it must needs be, therefore, 
that he be exceptionally chastised. 

We are told, too, that in his captivity " he 
humbled himself greatly" A certain proportion 
runs through his history. A great sinner, a great 
sufferer, a great penitent. God works thoroughly. 
He is faithful in adjusting the discipline to the 
exigency. Whom he loves, he chastens propor- 
tionately to his necessities. He spares not the rod 
at the expense of the child's soul. He plans for 
eternity, not for time. So would we have it — 
would we not? — in the experience of our chil- 
dren. 

Often is this experience repeated in common life, 
whether our weafc souls would so have it or not. 
God is faithful beyond our desires. Like other 
wise fathers, he adjusts his dealings to the future 
judgment and desires of his children. He trusts 
to eternity for his justification in our sight. The 
prayers of the Christian father and mother for the 
wayward son are answered in waves and billows 
of affliction often, till the prodigal comes back, and 
humbles himself greatly, and says, " I have sinned 
against my father and my father's God." 

If a star in our evening sky should stray from 
its orbit, it could not go beyond the reach of those 



134 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

laws of matter and motion which have governed it 
from its birth. Gravitation would still hold it, as 
in grooves of iron which the ages could not wear 
away. Such a wandering star is a wayward and 
ungodly son of godly parents. An outcast though 
he be, the subject of scalding tears and despairing 
prayers, yet from those prayers he can never get 
loose. For years and years they will hold him 
within the circuit of salvation. They will follow 
him beyond the seas. Into the most loathsome 
dens of vice they will pursue and surround him as 
with a wall of fire. To the demons of temptation 
they are a voice of defiance and of challenge, say- 
ing, " Ye shall not have this child of mine : so help 
me God!" 

And often God is in the voice. I have heard a 
Christian mother of an outcast son say, "I know 
that my boy will yet be converted to Jesus Christ. 
It has been told to me in my hours of agonizing 
prayer. I have given him to God. He is no longer 
mine. I may not live to see it ; but God will take 
care of the treasure I have committed to his keep- 
ing. I shall see my son in heaven." Who shall 
dare to say nay to such a trusting woman ? It is 
just like God to do such sovereign things. 

6. The salvation of this penitent prince should 
be both an encouragement and a warning to those sons 
of Christian parents who have lost the paths of virtue. 
Often is it said of the penitent thief on the cross, 
that one such case is recorded in the Scriptures, 



THE PRODIGAL SON OF GODLY PARENTS. 185 

that none may despair of repentance on a death- 
bed ; and but one, that none may presume. 

Similar is the twofold lesson to be learned from 
the recovery of this fallen monarch. He tried the 
fearful experiment of abandoning the God of his 
fathers, and becoming a monument of illustrious 
guilt. Through bitter disappointment and humil- 
iating sorrow, he was saved. The Scriptures ex- 
pressly contradict the Jewish tradition. But he 
was one of a thousand. No other such is clearly 
declared in the Scriptures to have run that risk 
with safety at the last. God can save a soul in 
such an extremity of sin ; but it is like lifting to 
its place again a fallen star. Fallen stars generally 
go out in darkness. 

That is an exceptional hazard which a young 
man incurs in such an experience. It is like cross- 
ing Niagara over the rapids, on a tight-rope. One 
Blondin out of forty millions may have done it, 
and reached the hither shore in safety ; but would 
you or I risk it for that? The general law of 
God's dealings with men is that strange and un- 
natural wickedness shall be left to itself to work 
out its own penalties. This it did in the case of 
King Ahaz. 

Place these two royal sinners side by side. 
Both had the example and teachings and prayers 
of godly parents. Both broke loose from these 
restraints, and ran a career of wild and defiant 
crime. One was saved, the other lost ; one taken, 



136 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

the other left. Why the difference we know not. 
It is the way of God to do autocratic things. But 
woe to him who presumes upon God's regal mercy, 
to defy his laws and trample on his grace ! The 
probabilities are incalculably great that he will 
be left to his own chosen way, and to mourn at 
last, — 
" The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted." 






THE TWIN SERPENTS. 

And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, 
when they were in the field, that. Cain rose up against Abel his 
brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, Where 
is Abel thy brother ? And he said, I know not : am I my broth- 
er's keeper ? And he said, What hast thou done ? The voice 
of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground. And 
now thou art cursed from the earth, which hath opened her 
mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand. A fugitive 
and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. And Cain said unto 
the Lord, My punishment is greater than I can bear. — Gen. iv. 
8-13. 

THE story of Cain is the story of all ages. Sin, 
suffering; the one following the other by a 
law fixed and imperative like that by which pain 
agonizes a burning hand. A living poet speaks of 

" The coils 
Of those twin serpents, — Sin and Suffering." 

So far as the narrative informs us, the suffering 
of the first murderer was mental suffering. Dis- 
ease did not blast him ; chains did not bind him ; 
the mysterious mark on his forehead was not a 
burning brand. He went his way like other men. 
He had sons and daughters : he built the first city 
known in history. Tradition says that he founded 

137 



138 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

many cities, and became the head of a great em- 
pire. Yet Cain " went out from the presence of the 
Lord." He lived a life of conscious curse. The 
serpents coiled within. Cursed in thought, cursed 
in feeling, cursed in fears, cursed in blasted hopes, 
cursed in one long despair : such was life to the 
first man who bore the fruit of the first matured 
and ripened sin. And such will be the life of the 
last man who shall go out from the presence of 
the Lord, bearing the burden of a finished crime 
unrepentejd of and unforgiven. 

Sin finds in the very constitution of the human 
mind the enginery of its own retribution. Let us 
note some of these retributive experiences of sin, 
as developed in the common life of men. 

1. The very consciousness of sin is destructive of a 
sinner s peace. The consciousness of sin is itself 
suffering. " Sin revived, and I died," is the testi- 
mony of St. Paul. And this is the testimony of 
every sinner of every age. The bare conviction 
of guilt in having transgressed the law of God is 
the basis of the keenest anguish a man ever suffers 
in this world or any other. 

We are so made that it cannot be otherwise. 
God has so constituted our nature that no man 
ever yet lived who felt absolutely no emotion 
when the naked fact of sin was laid on his con- 
science by the Spirit of God, and held there. 
That fact of guilt, to a soul thus compelled to face 
it, is like a live coal to a naked eyeball. 



THE TWIN SEBPENTS. 139 

Moreover, the worst of it is that conscience, if 
left to itself, never finds an adequate remedy. It 
never teaches a sinner how he may gain deliver- 
ance from sin or suffering. It never hints to him 
the possibility of deliverance from either. That 
is no part of its design. The design of conscience 
is simply to express God's law. Therefore, in a 
sinner's experience, its working is to express the 
evil of transgressing that law. Its legitimate 
work is to pour out upon a sinner burning and 
indignant accusations of guilt, of folly, of dis- 
honor, of degradation, of moral defilement, of of- 
fensiveness to the holy universe, and of exposure 
to the wrath of a holy God, and — leave them there. 

2. The destructive working of sin in a sinner's 
experience is further seen in the fact that sin tends 
to develop sin. Like all other forms of character, 
sin grows. Never for an hour is it at a standstill. 
No soul can live in eternal infancy. One sin be- 
gets another sin. Nothing else in nature is so 
prolific. One sin roots itself in the soil of char- 
acter, and spreads itself outward, and lifts itself 
heavenward defiantly. Sin penetrates the under- 
ground of character, and forms there hidden enor- 
mities and unconscious depths of passion. A man 
of long experience in sin is always a worse man 
than he seems to himself to be. The day of judg- 
ment is to be a day of fearful surprises and over- 
whelming revolutions in self-knowledge. 

Sin full-grown defies law because it is law ; re- 



140 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

sists restraint because it is restraint ; contests au- 
thority with God because he is God. Says Cain, 
as depicted by Lord Byron in colloquy with Luci- 
fer, "I bend to neither God nor thee." Lord 
Byron knew whereof he affirmed. This is the 
legitimate heroism of sin. 

Sin runs to passion ; passion, to tumult in char- 
acter; and a tumultuous character tends to tem- 
pests and explosions, which scorn secrecies and 
disguises. Then the whole man comes to light. 
He sees himself, and others see him, as he is in 
God's sight. Those solemn imperatives and their 
awful responses, " Thou shalt not," — "I will," — 
"Thou shalt," — " I will not," — make up then 
all that the man knows of intercourse with God. 
This is sin in the ultimate and finished type of it. 
That is what it grows to in every sinner, if un- 
checked by the grace of God. Every man unre- 
deemed becomes a demon in eternity. 

3. The destructiveness of sin is still further seen 
in the apprehension of its discovery, with which the 
consciousness of guilt is always more or less pain- 
fully attended. Our souls are so made as to trem- 
ble at the thought of detection in wrong. This is 
often quite distinct from the fear of other suffering. 

A burglar, not long ago, entered and rifled the 
contents of an unoccupied dwelling at the seaside. 
He ransacked the rooms from attic to cellar, and 
heaped his plunder together in the parlor. There 
were evidences that there he had sat down to rest, 






THE TWIN SERPENTS. 141 

perhaps to think. On a bracket in the corner 
stood a marble bust of Guido's "Ecce Homo," 
Christ crowned with thorns. The guilty man had 
taken it in his hands, and examined it. It bore 
the marks of his fingers. But he had replaced it, 
and turned its face to the wall, as if he would not 
have even the cold, sightless eyes of the marble 
Saviour look upon his deed of infamy. Be it so, 
or not, there is in every human soul an instinct 
of concealment of sin, of which that act is a 
truthful emblem. The instinct of hiding clutches 
at every act of wrong-doing, and would bury it 
forever from the vision of pure eyes. The first 
act of the first sinner, when the fact of sin grew 
into his consciousness, was to hide himself at the 
sound of God's voice in the garden. Never till 
then had it been needful that God should ask, 
"Where art thou?" Thus human nature antici- 
pated all through earth's history the craving for 
a hiding-place. Thus it foreshadowed the last 
prayer of the last sinner : " Rocks and moun- 
tains, fall on us, and hide us from the face of Him 
that sitteth on the throne ! " 

But what is the effect of this craving for con- 
cealment on a sinner's life? It dooms him to 
moral solitude. It shuts him into the society of 
his own outraged conscience. He must bear the 
torture of an inevitable Nemesis alone. That 
sometimes goads him by the sheer dread of detec- 
tion to forestall it by confession, that he may be 



142 STUDIES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

rid of the torment of anticipating it. Do not the 
history of snicide in this world, and the records 
of tribunals of human justice, confirm this work- 
ing of the law of conscience ? 

These bodies of ours are so made as to be allies 
of conscience in this thing. They are sometimes 
all aglow and quivering with the signs by which 
this fear of detection in wrong discloses itself to 
the beholder. An eminent jurist in England, after 
long practice at the bar, said that he was awe- 
struck by the machinery for the discovery of false- 
hood which God had constructed in the muscles of 
the human countenance. The human face, he said, 
was the most honest thing he had ever found in 
man. If every thing else bore the mask of per- 
jury, he said, there was an involuntary muscle in 
one of the lips, which he had never known a wit- 
ness to be able to control in the act of giving per- 
jured testimony. The labial- muscle, true to the 
hand of Him who made it, would start and vibrate 
at the thrill of the fear of detection, in the soul 
which crouched at bay behind it. So impossible 
is it, in the last extremity, for a guilty being to 
suppress its dread of discovery as a distinct and 
positive source of suffering in the experience of 
sin. 

4. Once more, the destructiveness of sin in the 
experience of the sinner is seen in the foreboding 
of judicial and eternal retribution which is incident 
to sin. No two ideas are more indissolubly joined 



THE TWIN SERPENTS. 143 

in the working of the human mind than these two 
of suffering and sin. "Sin — suffering; suffering 
— sin." To a logical mind it is inevitable to rea- 
son from the one to the other, even to the tracery 
of a hair in the proportion of effect to cause. " So 
much sin, so much suffering:" this is law. And 
again, " So much suffering, so much sin : " this is 
law. Think what we may of it, this is law. Job's 
friends were true to the law of nature in this 
thing. These two angels of despair have trodden 
the ages as a winepress. It is the natural working 
of an honest conscience, unrelieved by the grace 
of God, to weld these two things together in the 
forebodings of a guilty soul. 

Hence, in the experience of sin, it is sheer na- 
ture to anticipate suffering. And eternal sin must 
involve eternal suffering: this is nature. Yes; 
" it must be so : thou reasonest well." By na- 
ture, as well as by revelation, the worm dieth not. 
It is not superstition to fear an eternal hell ; it is 
not bigotry to believe in it and to teach it : it is 
simple nature acting out one of its involuntary 
and elementary instincts. The heart's throbbing 
is not more natural. A fearful looking-for of 
judgment is, sooner or later, in the order of nature, 
the fruitage of all sin. 

Besides, the human conscience finds no end to 
it. Once a sinner, always a sinner : this is nature. 
Therefore, once a sinner, always a sufferer : this, 
too, is nature. Again we must say, think what we 



144 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

may of it, this is law. It is no peculiarity of the 
Bible. Priests have not made it so. The Bible is 
no more responsible for it than the Koran. It is 
an obstinate fact in the make of the human soul. 
It declares the doom of any and every soul, if left 
to itself to drag a history of sin behind it. 

Consequently man the world over trembles at 
something. Guilt sooner or later makes us all 
cowards. We are naturally afraid of God. We 
dread our own immortality. Who knows what is 
to come of it? We are afraid of death. Who 
has ever got an answer from the awful silence 
beyond? An English general of unquestioned 
courage confessed that he always trembled at the 
first boom of the cannon in battle. He feared it 
as much in his fiftieth fight as in his first. Do not 
such moments of standing eye to eye with death, 
and trembling at the booming echoes of eternity, 
occur in the lives of the best and the bravest of 
us? 

But why ? Why should a man fear death ? A 
caterpillar does not fear the chrysalis through 
which it passes to a thing of beauty. Ah ! but we 
are not butterflies. We are souls. We are images 
of God. Our dread of death, of immortality, of 
God, is the hammer of a deathless conscience fall- 
ing on the anvil of eternal right, with the power 
of an almighty will in the arm that wields it. 
Woe to any thing that lies between ! 

An honest conscience, then, can never point a 



THE TWIN SERPENTS. 145 

man to himself for peace. It never tells him to 
look within for that. It shuts him in to his de- 
spair, and leaves him there. This is all that na- 
ture can do for him. If there is no other source 
of hope, he "goes out," like Cain, "from the pres- 
ence of the Lord," to return no more. The twin 
serpents are the companions of his solitude, for- 
ever and forever. 

From this review of the working of sin in the 
experience of men, two things become obvious : — 

It is reasonable that a sinner should inquire anx- 
iously, " What shall I do to be saved?" No man 
has any reason to be ashamed of anxiety for the 
salvation of his soul. 

Equally obvious is the preciousness of the work 
of Christ. Christ becomes a reality to us, only by 
being felt to be a necessity. He is a reality only 
because he is a necessity. Here our thought should 
culminate, — in the preciousness of Christ to lost 
souls. Yes, lost ! No other one word expresses 
so truthfully the condition in which Christ finds 
us all. Lost to virtue ; lost to the respect and 
trust of the holy universe ; lost to the benignant 
operation of conscience ; lost to self-respect, to 
hope, to peace, to the conscious blessedness of 
being ; lost to the complacent love of Gocl, — the 
past all guilt, and the future all despair ! 

It is to such a being, to a crowded and forlorn 
world of such beings, that Christ gives himself. 
He gives himself to blot out the past. Oh, to 



146 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

blot out the past ! We know little of ourselves 
if our experience has not taught us the need 
of that. We know as little of Christ's work for 
us, if we have not experienced the reality of that. 
Yet how tame is language to express that expe- 
rience ! Are there not hours in which we can only 
adore in grateful silence the love of which we can- 
not speak? If we would speak, do we not fall 
back upon some such simple speech as that of 
those lines which have already been the solace 
of multitudes on death-beds, — 

" Just as I am, without one plea, 
Save that thy blood was shed for me, 
And that thou bid'st me come to thee, 
O Lamb of God, I come!" 






AVOWED ENEMIES OF EELIGION. 

After this did Sennacherib, king of Assyria, send his servants 
to Jerusalem (but he himself laid siege against Lachish, and all 
his power with him) unto Hezekiah, king of Judah, and unto all 
Judah that were at Jerusalem, saying, Thus saith Sennacherib, 
king of Assyria, Whereon do ye trust, that ye abide in the siege 
in Jerusalem? Know ye not what I and my fathers have done 
unto all the people of other lands ? Were the gods of the nations 
of those lands any ways able to deliver their lands out of mine 
hand ? Who was there among all the gods of those nations that 
my fathers utterly destroyed, that could deliver his people out 
of mine hand, that your God should be able to deliver you out 
of mine hand? And his servants spake yet more against the 
Lord God, and against his servant Hezekiah. — 2 Ckron. xxxii. 
9, 10, 13, 14, 16. 

THE enemies of religion are of two sorts. The 
enmity of one class is concealed from expres- 
sion in words. It is often accompanied with pro- 
fessions of respect. It is covered by outward 
virtues. It may not be distinctly known to the 
conscience of the man himself. The enmity of 
the other class is open and avowed. The Chris- 
tian religion is caricatured and libelled, and thus 
denounced. Its claims are ranked with those of 
obsolete mythologies. Religion itself in any form 
is pronounced to be the dream of superstition or 
the craft of priests. 

147 



148 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

This second class of enemies to the cross of 
Christ are very strikingly paralleled by the char- 
acter and deeds of the Assyrian king. He did 
and proposed to do by the sword, what they do 
and propose to do by tongue and pen. A very 
truthful picture of the one may be seen in the nar- 
rative of the other. Let us, then, read the char- 
acter of modern hostility to Christianity in that 
of Sennacherib and his marshals. 

1. The first thing which attracts our notice is 
their hoastfulness. The Assyrian monarch evident- 
ly had no mean opinion of himself. " Know ye 
not," he says, " what I and my fathers have done ? " 
" We are big men. We have great armies. We 
are flushed with victories. We do not know what 
it is to be beaten. Think twice, good people, 
before you presume to contend with me. Am not 
I the great and noble Sennacherib, successor to 
Nimrod the mighty, the victor in a hundred bat- 
tles, who have put my foot on the neck of kings ? " 
Such is the strain in which this Assyrian fellow 
swaggers at the people of the living God. 

Hardly could a more truthful picture be drawn 
of the open enemies of God in every age. One 
thing is always characteristic of them, — they 
know how to brag. Self-conceit is their most 
obvious quality. They are rich in brass. Their 
claims are astounding to one who has not learned 
their loud policy. Voltaire predicted with brazen 
effrontery that Christianity would be defunct in 



AVOWED ENEMIES OF RELIGION. 149 

twenty-five years. He claimed that he and the 
encyclopaedists of France had written it to death. 
Yet to-day, after a century has gone by, the copies 
of the Christian Scriptures circulated in France 
alone, papal though it be, are numbered by hun- 
dreds of thousands every year, while the book- 
sellers say that no other works lie on their shelves 
so long as the once-famous works of Voltaire. 

It is a favorite device — one cannot call it argu- 
ment — with the enemies of the gospel, to claim 
that it is obsolete. The world has outlived it. 
Like other superstitions it has had its day. The 
Old Testament especially is the object of this brag- 
gart strategy. " Does anybody believe that stuff 
now ? " said a very young lady to a friend not long 
ago. " The world made in six days? Joshua stop- 
ping the sun ? Jonah and the whale, and all that ? 
Ha, ha ! I thought that intelligent people had got 
over that." Probably she would have found it 
no easy matter to give a reason for her denial of 
the faith of her fathers. But her flippancy was 
the fruit of the loud-mouthed assertions of infidel- 
ity that the Old Testament is defunct. 

Any lie persisted in may gain the force and mo- 
mentum of a truth. These naked denials of bibli- 
cal facts constitute in our day a very large share 
of the capital of infidelity. Science, it is claimed, 
has disproved the Mosaic cosmogony, at the very 
time when scientific men are finding out that there 
is a mysterious coincidence between the Mosaic 



150 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

and the geologic records. The testimony of the 
Book and the testimony of the rocks agree to such 
marvellous extent that unchristian scientists are 
beginning to inquire where Moses got Ms informa- 
tion. Moses somehow knew what it has taken 
science four thousand years to discover. 

The growth of Christianity, it is declared, has 
ceased, and it is far on in the process of its de- 
cline ; at the very time when secular historians are 
lauding it as outweighing all other civilizing forces 
put together. 

The intelligence of the Christian system is de- 
nied : it is claimed to be only fit for children and 
fools ; at the very time when it is commanding the 
faith of a larger proportion of the thinkers of the 
race than any other system known in history. 

Christian missions are pronounced a failure, at 
the very time when they have made Christianity 
a power which the nations respect and idolatry 
fears over more than half the world. Cannibal 
tribes are transformed into fit allies of the most 
renowned empires and most enlightened republics 
on the globe, in less than half a century, by the 
preaching of a few men who went forth to their 
work amidst the world's mingled compassion and 
derision, — compassion for their fate, and derision 
for their folly; and yet the attempt to Christian- 
ize "happy and contented idolaters " is declared 
an antiquated blunder. 

This, I repeat, is the policy by which the en£- 



AVOWED ENEMIES OF KELIGION. 151 

mies of the Christian religion expect to browbeat 
its friends ont of their faith. This policy is very 
old. Our religion has outlived a great many de- 
velopments of it. First it was astronomy ; then it 
was geology; then it was Chinese and Indian his- 
tory; then it was Egyptian chronology; then it 
was flint arrowheads and stone hatchets ; and now 
it is evolution and the correlation of forces, and so 
on, — which infidelity has declared to have been the 
death-blow to Christianity and the annihilation of 
its sacred books. The claim is not a prediction, 
not a conjecture, but a declaration of historic fact. 
The thing is done. The Christian system is de- 
funct. All that the world has to do with it in 
future is to smile at the comedy, and learn wisdom 
from the blunder. It is in vain that we point to 
the achievements of our faith now in progress, and 
claim that it is a very lively thing for a dead thing. 
There is a class of " advanced thinkers " who will 
have their way about it. They ring the changes 
on the old story, — that the Christian religion is 
obsolete, and belongs henceforth to the historic 
mythologies. " Philosophers " and " seers " and 
"liberal thinkers" talk of Confucius and Zoro- 
aster, and Moses and Mahomet, and Jesus and Soc- 
rates, — all in a breath, as if they were of equal 
authority, and all alike ciphers in the " Church of 
the Future." 

It is related of an ancient king, that having van- 
quished his rival in battle, and taken him captive, 






152 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

lie confined him in a cage, from which he was led 
out in chains daily, and compelled to bend to the 
ground at the saddle-bows of his victor, who used 
his prostrate body as a riding-block to assist him 
in mounting his horse. Like that is the imperious 
spirit with which the avowed enemies of Christ 
treat his claims to their faith. 

2. A second feature by which this kind of hos- 
tility to religion is characterized is its special ani- 
mosity to the ministers of the gospel. It is notice- 
able that the bragging Assyrian does not address 
his appeal chiefly to the Judsean king and his offi- 
cial representatives. His attempt is to stir up 
revolt among the populace, by appeals to their 
superstition and their fears. The official head of 
the kingdom and his subalterns are treated with 
contempt. They " spake yet more against the Lord 
God, and against his servant Hezekiah." As the 
head of a theocratic kingdom, Hezekiah was the 
chief official representative to his people of the true 
religion. 

Again and again is this hostility to the ministers 
of religion displayed by its open foes. The people 
are exhorted to revolt against " the priests." The 
popular name which infidelity gives to Christian- 
ity is " priestcraft." In every large community 
in which enmity to the gospel is openly professed, 
is to be found a class of men who are pre-eminent- 
ly minister-haters. Their ridicule and denuncia- 
tion are specially aimed at the clergy. No other 



AVOWED ENEMIES OF RELIGION. 158 

class of men receive at their hands such severe 
measure and uncandid judgment. The human 
frailties of ministers are the butt of their satire. 
The fall of a minister, they never let the world 
hear the last of. That good-nature which the ma- 
jority of civilized beings extend to men of other 
professions, is often denied to ministers. Lawyers, 
judges, physicians, merchants, teachers, journalists, 
may depend upon a fair hearing and a genial look 
from these men ; but they are porcupines to minis- 
ters. When will the enemies to the popular the- 
ology of New England have done with Cotton 
Mather ? When will the opponents of the Puri- 
tan faith, throughout the country, have done with 
the Salem witchcraft, and the whipping of Quak- 
ers, and the banishment of Roger Williams ? Will 
the world ever accept the truth about the Connect- 
icut Blue Laws? 

The clergy, who are held responsible for all the 
moral blunders of their age, are the most roundly 
abused of men, living or dead. It is a sign of the 
general excellence of their character, and a sign, 
too, that infidelity fears them, that, with such con- 
centration of the world's shafts upon them, they 
exist at all to-day, as a class respected and loved 
by anybody. No thanks are due to religious lib- 
eralism, that their characters are safe anywhere. 
What does communism say of the Christian cler- 
gy? What did it do to the humane and godly 
Archbishop of Paris in 1871? 



154 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

3. Avowed enmity to religion is often character- 
ized also by the plausibility of its reasonings against 
the destiny of Christianity. Sennacherib was a 
shrewd fellow. His speech to the Jewish popu- 
lace was a very cunning specimen of demagogical 
oratory. His argument was a very plausible one. 
His facts were true. He and his fathers had been 
mighty men. Their arms had been crowned with 
success. The nations cowered before them. The 
gods of the nations had been as helpless before 
their conquering legions as so many bullocks. 
Reasoning upon the facts in the light of no other 
than the pagan theology, Sennacherib was right. 
His conquest of Judaea was a foregone conclusion. 

" Were the gods of those nations any ways able 
to deliver their lands out of mine hand? " 

"No." 

"Who was there among all the gods of those 
nations that could deliver his people ? " 

" Not a god." 

"How much less shall your God deliver you 
out of my hand ! — you, little petty Judah, not so 
large as the least of my provinces ! " 

" True : it is a fact." 

Such must have been the colloquy between 
them, carried on by the Jewish hearers silently 
and with sinking hearts. On the pagan theory of 
the gods, and in the light of recent history, the 
Assyrian monarch had the best of the argument 
by all odds. 



AVOWED ENEMIES OF RELIGION. 155 

So it often seems in the controversy between 
religion and its avowed enemies. They often 
seem to make out a strong case of it. Much can 
be plausibly said against religion and its friends. 
Facts can be made to seem conclusive against 
them. Real difficulties are found in our faith, 
which no wise man will pretend that he does not 
feel. Science discloses facts which require modi- 
fications of our interpretations of the Scriptures. 
Astronomy gave a fearful shock to popular faith 
in the Bible — simple as it seems to us now — 
when it revealed the fact that the sun did not 
move around the earth. As simple will seem the 
explanation of other scientific mysteries by and 
by; but they are none the less startling at the 
outset, for that. 

The ministers of religion, too, are but men, often 
weak men, sometimes wicked men, always imper- 
fect men. The assaults of infidelity upon them 
often seem very plausible. Religion itself has to 
bear the brunt of them. 

Specially do the confident predictions of the 
downfall of Christianity often seem morally cer- 
tain. The philosophical proof alone of this is 
unanswerable. It is the great marvel of history, 
that such a religion as ours can hold its own at all 
in such a world as this. By all the laws of human 
evidence by which men prognosticate the future, 
the Christian religion ought long before this time 
to have disappeared from the face of the earth. 



156 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Its temples ought to be now antiquarian ruins, of 
which curious travellers should be ferreting out 
the history and the meaning. The Scriptures 
ought now to be stored in antiquarian libraries, 
not read or cared for by twenty men in a genera- 
tion. 

On purely philosophical grounds, the enemies 
of our religion are right in their assurances of its 
speedy overthrow. The balance of natural prob- 
abilities is never in its favor. The great forces of 
this world are its allied foes. Crises have oc- 
curred in its history, in which persecution has 
been backed up by wealth, by learning, by the 
prestige of antiquity, by civil law, by public opin- 
ion, and by bayonets, — by all the great forces 
which sway society and compact empires; and 
thus allied, it has borne down — upon what? 
Upon armies bristling with steel? upon Ehren- 
breitsteins and Cronstadts ? No : upon a handful 
of poor men and friendless women and little chil- 
dren, who had no weapon of defence but prayer ! 

Many times has the success of persecution 
seemed to be a foregone conclusion. Many times 
has its success appeared to be an accomplished 
fact. It has laughed at failure as a bugbear. It 
has burnt up the handful of men, women, and chil- 
dren, as the Duke of Alva did in the Netherlands. 
The people of God even have often thought their 
case a hopeless one. "We trusted that it had 
been he that should have redeemed Israel." Oh, 



AVOWED ENEMIES OE RELIGION. 157 

yes ! We did trust, but our trust is disappointed. 
Our enemies have triumphed. Our cause is hope- 
less. We can only lie down and die. 

Periods sometimes occur in which scepticism 
becomes for a time the popular mood of a nation. 
Infidelity is greeted by the controlling minds of 
the time. Universities and royal societies nurse 
it. Elegant literature dandles it. Poetry sings 
it. The sciences pay tribute to it. Fashion co- 
quets with it. Philosophy crowns it. Wealth 
builds temples to it. Philanthropy and liberty 
bring incense to it from afar. Even to the friends 
of Christ it seems as if every thing were going 
against them. Society seems to have run mad 
with unbelief. What was Paris in 1789, and again 
in 1871, but one vast lunatic-asylum of unbe- 
lievers? At such times, to worldly wisdom it is 
the right thing to prophesy the speedy extinction 
of Christianity. 

4. The history of the avowed enemies of Christ 
is characterized by the certainty, the suddenness, and 
the unexpected means of their disappointment. 

Somebody made very short work with Sennache- 
rib. One night was time enough to answer his 
gasconade at the people of God. One verse is all 
that the historian thinks necessary to tell the 
story : " The Lord sent an angel which cut off all 
the mighty men of valor." One angel of the 
Lord was a match for the Assyrian battalions. 
The mighty men were not looking for such a re- 



158 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

enforcement to their enemy. That was the last 
thing they dreamed of. That destroying angel, 
be it a pestilence or a storm, or a miraculous appa- 
rition, was the " angel of death " to a hundred 
and eighty-five thousand of the Assyrian hosts 
before morning. 

The fame of that mysterious event spread 
quickly around the world. It became the. symbol 
of all sudden national deliverances. It lives thus 
to our own times. Isaiah's triumphant description 
of it is read every year in the churches of Moscow, 
on the anniversary of the salvation of the Russian 
Empire by the celebrated retreat of the French 
army in 1815. The opening watchword of the 
Judsean song of triumph, " God is our refuge and 
strength," has furnished the inscription over the 
greatest of Eastern churches in Constantinople. 
It is the foundation, too, of the noblest national 
hymn in Western Europe, — Luther's far-famed 
" Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott." 

An English poet has celebrated the event in 
words so full of the old Hebrew spirit as to de- 
serve citation here : — 

" The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, 
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold. 



Like the leaves of the forest when summer is green, 
That host with their banners at sunset were seen: 
Like the leaves of the forest when autumn hath blown, 
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown. 



AVOWED ENEMIES OF EELIGION. 159 

For the angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, 
And breathed in the face of the foe as he passed ; 
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, 
And their hearts but once heaved, and forever grew still! 

And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide, 

But through it there rolled not the breath of his pride. 



And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, 
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown; 
And the might of the Gentile, un smote by the sword, 
Hath melted like snow at the glance of the Lord." 

The history of our religion develops often a 
similar phenomenon in God's dealings with its 
avowed and boastful enemies. They are sure to 
be disappointed in the result. Something keeps 
Christianity alive to-day, centuries after, by the 
logic of its foes, it ought to have been dead and 
buried. Something makes it grow and thrive. 
It never had a deeper hold upon the world's faith 
than now. Never before did its friends look out 
upon a more resplendent future. 

Often the local triumphs of our religion occur 
suddenly. A revival of religion changes the mood 
of a community in a month. Corrupt institutions 
like slavery fall suddenly, and by unlooked-for 
agencies. Times of apparent decline of religion 
are often times of preparation, in which great 
principles are secretly taking root ; and at length 
they start up and grow as acknowledged powers 
of Christian truth. The visible progress of our 



160 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

religion in the world is commonly by sudden leaps 
and revolutionary changes. A single angel from 
the living God works out results at which both 
friends and enemies of truth stand amazed. 

Sometimes in private communities it is the 
angel of Death. Opposers of religion are some- 
times removed at a moment so critical, that men 
cannot but silently put the two things together. 
By ways of his own, God achieves his eternal 
purposes. 

" God moves in a mysterious way, 
His wonders to perform.' ' 



A TALK WITH YOUNG PEOPLE ABOUT 
JOSIAH. 

Josiah was eight years old when he began to reign, and he 
reigned in Jerusalem one and thirty years. And he did that 
which was right in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the ways 
of David his father, and declined neither to the right hand nor 
to the left. For in the eighth year of his reign, while he was yet 
young, he began to seek after the God of David his father : and 
in the twelfth year he began to purge Judah and Jerusalem 
from the high places, and the groves, and the carved images, and 
the molten images. — 2 Chron. xxxiv. 1-3. 

IT is a noticeable fact, tftat the histories in the 
Old Testament, of kings and other great men, 
tell us so much about their youth. Where they 
were born ; who their fathers and mothers were ; 
what happened to them in their childhood; how 
old they were when they began to reign ; the fact 
that some of them were boy-princes, — just the 
things about them which interest young people in 
them in all ages, — are thought worthy of a place 
in the word of God. We may reasonably take it 
as a sign that God feels special interest in children 
and youth, that he has constructed the Bible so. 

The story of Josiah is not so well known as 
those of Samuel and Joseph ; but it is told with 

161 



162 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

the same kind of zest, and is as full of lessons 
most valuable to the young. 

1. It shows, among other things, that a child 
may become a Christian very early in life. He was 
but fifteen years old when he is spoken of as 
"seeking the God of his father David." That 
was the first that people knew of it. But probably 
he had been a prayerful boy long before that. 
He had been a king then for seven years. If he 
had been a wild wayward youth, this would proba- 
bly have been mentioned. 

There is no more difficulty now in a young per- 
son's becoming a Christian than there was in the 
case of King Josiah or of Samuel. When youth 
has been spent in sin, sin has become a habit. 
The habit of sin is quick in forming. Once 
formed, it is a powerful hinderance to conversion. 
The natural and easy way for a child is to groiv 
up. sl Christian, so as never to remember the time 
when he was not one. 

Nathan Dickerman is sometimes spoken of as 
an unnatural boy, because he gave evidence of 
being a child of God at the age of four years. 
Many have thought that that had something to do 
with his early death. "All the good boys die 
early," it is said of Sunday-school books. The 
books may not all be what they ought to be, but 
Nathan Dickerman's early piety was just the most 
natural thing in the world. We shall probably 
have many such cases as the millennium ap- 



A TALK ABOUT JOSIAH. 163 

proaches. That is the true way of coming into 
the church, — growing into it from earliest years. 

2. The narrative of this young king shows also 
that young persons may become Christians without 
the excitement of a revival. I have heard children 
wish that a great revival would occur, and carry 
them into the kingdom of Christ in a whirl of 
excitement. They think it would be so much 
easier, if everybody else were beginning to serve 
God. If their companions were ready ; if George 
and Henry and Mary and Julia would join them ; 
if there were a great stir about religion ; if people 
were talking of nothing else, — it would appear so 
natural then to do as others do ! If Mr. Ham- 
mond, the children's preacher, would come, and 
hold a series of meetings, and form a child's 
church, with a covenant which a child could 
understand, some imagine that they would be 
among the first to rise and say, "I will obey 
Christ." 

Perhaps they would ; yet they might not be 
any nearer heaven than now. People are often 
deceived in a revival. None are more likely to be 
so than young people, who know little of their 
own hearts. In a great excitement, Satan often 
tries to make one think one is a Christian falsely, 
so as to escape real conversion. 

Besides, often the great test of our willingness 
to obey God is, whether we are willing to do it 
alone. To do what others do not, may be the very 



164 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

thing that God requires. If we truly love God, 
we should obey him if we were the only persons 
in the world to do it. We should do it all the 
more for being alone. If the dear Saviour had no 
other friend, would you desert him, and leave him 
with none ? It would be heroic to stand by him 
then. This Josiah did when he began the refor- 
mation of his kingdom : he stood absolutely alone. 
He started the revival by being the first convert. 

The great question is an individual one. Daniel 
Webster once said, that, of all the subjects of 
human thought that had ever occurred to him, this 
was the greatest and the most impressive, — " the 
personal relation of the soul to God." Salvation lies 
between each single soul alone and God alone. Each 
one of us must die alone. Each one must go into 
eternity alone. Each one must be judged alone. 
It will matter very little then what others have 
done. God will inquire of you what you have 
done. Why should you wait for others, or they 
for you ? Waiting is a perilous thing when God 
says "Now." "To-morrow" has ruined a great 
many souls, 

3. King Josiah^s conversion shows that a young 
person may become a Christian just at the time when 
the pleasures of the world are the most attractive. 
He was at an age when the world is fresh and new 
to a young man. He was a king. This world is 
a beautiful place to a youthful prince who has 
health and wealth and leisure and princely com- 



A TALK ABOUT JOSIAH. 165 

panions to make it such. One could be happy in 
such a world forever. 

The young often plead it as an excuse for neg- 
lecting to obey God, that they are so young ; the 
world so new; so many of their associates are 
irreligious; and they have so much to make a 
worldly life enjoyable. Not so did the youthful 
king reason. Life could scarcely look more at- 
tractive to anybody than it did to him. He might 
have made one long holiday of it. That was the 
fashion of the time. Nobody thought it necessary 
to be religious but a few old gray-haired prophets. 
It would have attracted no notice, and nobody 
would have blamed him, if he had lived a life of 
respectable neglect of God. But he loved God. 
He wished to please God. 

The happiest life conceivable in this world is 
the life of one to whom God gives the" innocent 
enjoyments of youth, and adds to them the deeper 
joys of religion. There is no contradiction be- 
tween them. God enjoys the sports of the young 
more than they do, if only they love him. Who 
is it that makes the lambs skip, and the birds sing, 
and the squirrels chirp, and the bees hum ? Their 
pleasure is all pleasure to God. 

4. The story of Josiah shows, further, that a 
child may be a Christian without being unmanly or 
unwomanly. Boys sometimes imagine that religion 
will take the spirit all out of them. I have never 
heard girls say this, but I suspect they have often 



166 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

felt it. I have heard it said that " the pious boy 
is the milksop of the family." If this is true, it is 
very strange that King Josiah did not turn out so. 
He began to be religious very early. We do not 
know that he was ever any thing else. But even 
at the age of nineteen years he was a great reform- 
er. Eeformers are not apt to be milksops. Did 
anybody ever call Luther a milksop ? The pope 
did not call him so. He found him such a lively 
opponent that he could think of nothing to do with 
him but to burn him. When Luther entered the 
hall where the Diet of Worms was in session, one of 
the ablest military commanders of the age tapped 
him on the shoulder, and said, "Monk, monk, 
thou art on a passage more perilous than I evei 
knew on the bloodiest battle-field." Such milk- 
sops are the great reformers of the world. 

King Josiah was one of such. He did for his 
country and age what Luther did for Europe. He 
was the most energetic man in his kingdom. We 
sometimes say of a very bright youth, that he is 
the life of the house. King Josiah was just that. 
He made things lively for everybody. Judah 
never had a more spirited and gallant prince. Had 
he lived in the middle ages, he would have been 
renowned for all chivalrous virtues. Did you ever 
read of the " Knights of St. John " ? In all their 
innocent exploits, King Josiah would have been 
one of them. He put down the bad men of the 
realm, right and left, most valiantly. Not one of 
them dared to insult him. 



A TALK ABOUT JOSIAH. 167 

At last he lost his life by courageous exposure 
in battle, though warned beforehand not to risk it. 
The whole nation mourned for him as one of the 
bravest monarchs they had ever had; and this 
after a long reign of thirty-odd years. If his piety 
had made a prig of him, would not his people have 
found him out in that time ? Yet they loved him 
and mourned for him, much as our country loved 
and mourned for President Lincoln. 

Let me tell you how the idea has come about, 
that religion makes a boy a chicken-hearted fellow. 
It is just because religion cultivates certain still 
virtues. Benevolence, purity, reverence, meek- 
ness, charity, the forgiveness of injuries, and such 
like, are required by the law of Christ. A young 
man who becomes a Christian will not swear, nor 
quarrel with his companions, nor break the sab- 
bath, nor insult his teachers, nor sing ribald songs 
in the streets, nor brag about fighting everybody. 
In a word, he will not be a rowdy, but a gentle- 
man. Therefore he will be nicknamed " milksop " 
by rowdies. That he must expect. It is an honor 
to be nicknamed by rowdies. He should remem- 
ber that all that religion requires of him in this 
respect is that he cultivate and practise the very 
virtues which are necessary to make a gentleman. 
The very highest type of character which the cul- 
ture of the world has ever conceived of is that of 
a Christian gentleman. And that is precisely what 
religion makes a young man. By the way, have 



168 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

you ever thought what is the meauing of this word 
" gentleman " ? It is only a gentle-man. That is, 
a man possessed of the quiet and passive graces, 
just those which the Christian religion teaches. 
Wickedness always tends to rudeness, to violence, 
to angry and turbulent passions, to loud and pro- 
fane speech. The noblest culture of the world 
unconsciously supports the Christian religion in 
teaching a boy that he must be a gentle-man. 

I have heard of an ignorant boy who was very 
fond of fighting, who, when he was asked who 
was the person in heaven whom he most wanted 
to see, sang out, at the top of his voice, " Go- 
liath ! " He thought the Philistine giant was a 
much more respectable man than Solomon. So 
long as we number among the godly men of the 
world such men as David and Solomon and 
Josiah, and St. Louis of France, and Edward the 
Sixth of England, and Gustavus Adolphus, and 
William of Orange, and Washington, and Lincoln, 
we have no reason to fear that our religion will 
make us chicken-hearted. When that takes place, 
the world will have to find some other name for 
its finest characters than that of gentle-man. 

5. The history of this ancient prince suggests 
also that one ivho becomes a Christian early in life 
is likely to become a better man than one who first 
lives through a career of sin. He is likely to be a 
more consistent Christian. He will probably 
have fewer faults to get rid of, and fewer habits 
which his piety must break up. 



A TALK ABOUT JOSIAH. 169 

It is remarkable that through the whole of 
Josiah's long reign, — one of the longest in Judsean 
annals, — not one wrong thing is recorded of him. 
Doubtless he had faults, and did wrong things; 
but not one was important enough to be men- 
tioned in the Bible. Other great and good men 
are mentioned in the Scriptures, who were very 
inconsistent. They did some very wicked things. 
Some of them had long periods of wickedness, 
in which they displeased God exceedingly, and 
had to suffer for it. The Bible is very honest 
about its great men. It does not conceal their 
faults, nor make them out better than they were. 
But of King Josiah it has not a thing to say 
with which God finds fault. The only important 
mistake recorded of him was that in which he lost 
his life by fighting with the king of Egypt. The 
narrative appears to indicate that God incited the 
Egyptian king to warn him that he would lose 
his life if he went into the battle. But there is no 
evidence that he knew that the warning came from 
God. He thought it was the notion only of his 
enemy. He determined that his enemy should 
not outwit him in that way. Therefore, like the 
brave man he was, and the father of his country, 
he plunged into the thickest of the fight, and died 
as brave soldiers love to die. Except that one 
mistake of excessive bravery and patriotism, not 
a thing is recorded of him that went wrong. 

This indicates that as he grew up to manhood 



170 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

he had a very symmetrical character. He was a 
great and good man all around. This was the 
natural result of his early piety. Other things 
being equal, those become the best men and 
women who spend the largest portion of their 
lives in serving God. They have the least to 
undo, in consecrating their lives to Christ, the 
fewest old sins to overcome, the least headway of 
sinful habit to get rid of. 

In my boyhood I used to attend the church of 
the late Rev. Albert Barnes of Philadelphia. He 
used to preach, once in two months, a sermon' to 
us children. We thought him the holiest man in 
the world. We used to call him "the beloved 
disciple," he was so like the apostle John. We 
did not believe that St. John was a better man. 
But I well remember his confessing to us, that, 
though he had then been a Christian for more 
than twenty years, he had not entirely got over 
certain wrong habits of thought and feeling which 
he had indulged in his youth. He lamented all 
his life that he had not given his heart to God in 
his boyhood. He said, that, if he had done so, he 
should have been a better Christian and a hap- 
pier man. 

6, The story of this good king suggests further, 
that the way for a young person to become a Christian 
is to make a business of doing right. Josiah's whole 
life was spent in setting things right throughout his 
kingdom. Before his reign every thing had gone 



A TALK ABOUT JOSIAH. 171 

wrong. The worship of God was neglected. Idols 
were worshipped instead. The word of God was 
lost. The people had become so wicked as to have 
forgotten what God had commanded in the law of 
Moses. That was as if you and I should become 
so heedless of God's words as to forget the Lord's 
Prayer. The temple which Solomon had built with 
such magnificence was so neglected that cattle 
broke into it ; and every thing was in a bad way. 

As soon as the young king was old enough to 
understand the state of things, he set himself, and 
his ministers, and his cabinet, and his soldiers, and 
his workmen, to putting things to rights. He be- 
gan early, and kept at it, and spent his life in it. 
Nobody else put him up to it. It was his own 
idea. We are told that he " covenanted to serve 
God with all his heart and with all his soul." 
This is what I mean by making a business of doing 
right. He started with the very first thing that 
he had to do, and did it right, and in order to please 
God. 

Now, this is the true way to be a Christian. 
There is no great mystery about it. There is noth- 
ing in it which a child cannot do by the grace of 
God as well as anybody else. You can do it as 
well as I. God does not require you to go through 
any long season of unhappiness, in trying to feel 
as some others have felt in repenting of sin. You 
have only to do right in order to please Christ. 
That is religion, and that is the whole of it. 



172 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

To a young child, religion consists very largely 
in obeying parents; running on errands pleas- 
antly ; speaking the truth ; learning lessons faith- 
fully ; being respectful to teachers ; being kind to 
playmates, especially the poor ones and unhappy 
ones; reverencing the aged; praying with the 
heart, instead of " saying prayers ; " and doing 
all these things in order to please Christ, because 
he is good and has died for you, and you love 
him. 

Take the very first thing you have to do ; be it 
only to go for a glass of water for your mother, or 
playing a game of croquet with your sister, when 
you had rather play marbles than do either: do 
the thing that costs you something, and do it right, 
and do it because it will please Christ. Christ 
will be pleased with it, as truly as he was with 
Solomon for building the temple, or with Josiah 
for repairing it. 

Then keep doing things right, and in order to 
please God, all your life. That is living a Chris- 
tian life. It will be made up largely of little 
things. Christ has taken pains to say to us that 
he is contented with little services from us. A 
cup of cold water given in the right way shall not 
lose its reward. He notices little things more 
than he does great ones, because there are more of 
them, and everybody can do them. Make a busi- 
ness of doing them right, and he will remember it 
thousands and millions of years hence, and when he 



A' TALK ABOUT JOSIAH. 173 

comes to judgment. Out of all the millions of 
people that will be there, he will call for you, and 
say, " Come, ye blessed of my Father. " 



AN ANCIENT MODEL OF YOUTHFUL 
TEMPERANCE. 

But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile 
himself with the portion of the king's meat, nor with the wine 
which he drank. — Dan. i. 8. 

THE Old Testament often seems as if it were 
inspired especially for young men. The les- 
son before us answers with singular pertinence 
the inquiry which every young man ought to ask 
and answer in a manly way : " What stand shall I 
take respecting obedience to the drinking usages of 
society?" 

We talk of the old prophets. But at the time 
of which we now speak, this one was a very young 
man. He comes home, therefore, to every young 
man's level. He takes each one by the hand for 
a plain brotherly talk on a very stale subject. 
Let us listen and overhear the young prophet's 
counsel. 

I. What were Daniel's temptations to abandon 
a life of abstinence from strong drink ? Many a 
namesake of his may look into his own life for the 
answer. 

1. He was tempted by his youth. He is sup- 

174 



ANCIENT MODEL OF TEMPERANCE. 175 

posed to have been from eighteen to twenty-two 
years of age, when the question of abstinence be- 
came a practical one to him. He was at the age 
when appetite is strong, health good, principle 
weak, and experience not at all. A young man 
starts often on a life of self-indulgence by simply 
doing nothing, thinking nothing, caring nothing. 
He just prolongs into manhood the animal instincts 
of childhood. Before he knows it the mischief is 
done. We are all animals before we are men. 
Drinking is our first natural pleasure. It is for 
each young man to say for -himself whether it 
shall be the last. 

2. Daniel was tempted also by the usages of his 
social rank. He was a noble, probably of the 
blood-royal. It was the usage of his order to 
drink wine, and the best of it, and much of it. 
Probably then, as now, it was the sign of a gentle- 
man in the circle of society in which the young 
nobleman moved, to know good wine when he 
tasted it, to use it freely, and to enjoy the social 
hilarity of it without scruple. Oriental literature 
had its drinking-songs, like those of Burns and 
Thomas Moore. Babylon had its Fifth Avenue, 
its Chestnut Street, its Beacon Street, where the 
social aristocracy of the city discussed the con- 
tents of their wine-cellars, as did the guests at the 
marriage in Cana. It required not a little moral 
courage for a young noble of the royal stock of 
Judah to go to the metropolitan dinner-parties, 



176 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

and leave his wine untasted. " An odd fellow, this 
young Hebrew ! " his companions said. " Yes, in- 
deed! Does the upstart Jew think to teach us 
what should be the habits pf a Babylonian gentle- 
man?" 

3. Daniel was tempted by the courtesies of offi- 
cial station. He was in training for the first office 
in the realm. He encountered the same tempta- 
tion which a young man would now encounter if 
he were invited to dine at the mansion of the 
French Minister in Washington. " If I have the 
honor of drinking the health of the beautiful and 
accomplished daughter of the Hon. Secretary 
Xerxes, shall I play the boor by refusing, for the 
sake of an absurd scruple about a glass of wine ? " 
Such was the gist of the question which put the 
principle of the young Hebrew to the test. How 
many young Americans in official circles would 
have borne the trial ? 

4. Daniel was tempted also by his professional 
prospects. Few young men have ever lived who 
have had a more splendid opening before them, to 
a magnificent professional career, than the young 
prophet statesman had at the court of Babylon. 
He was noted for his manly beauty. His personal 
address was that of an accomplished nobleman. 
He was acquiring the ripest culture of the age. 
He had only to conform to the usages of the most 
select and refined society of the capital, to make 
sure of a career which should satisfy the utmost 



ANCIENT MODEL OF TEMPEBANCE. 177 

ambition of an aspiring youth who was conscious 
that he had in him the making of a great states- 
man, and a leader of men. 

The temptation was the same in kind with that 
which assails a young lawyer or physician in New 
York or Philadelphia, who has his own way to 
make in his profession, and who, if true to the 
principle of total abstinence from intoxicating 
drinks, must by his example reprove the very men 
on whose support he depends for professional suc- 
cess. Said one such,." A carriage and a conscience 
are expensive luxuries. In my profession one can- 
not enjoy both. I prefer to drive my carriage." 
So did not the young civilian at the court of Baby- 
lon. 

More than one member of the American Con- 
gress has died a sot because he could not with- 
stand this form of temptation. One member of 
the Supreme Court of the United States, of a past 
generation, was persuaded by his friends to resign 
his office, and retire to the practice of his profes- 
sion in his native State, because he could not en- 
dure the peril to which the drinking habits of 
"Washington subjected a man in his position. " Bo- 
disco's wines are too much for me," was the lame 
apology of an intoxicated senator for his beastly 
appearance in the Senate Chamber after a dinner 
the night before at the mansion of the Russian 
minister. If report be true, more than one mem- 
ber of that honorable body now owe to the young 



178 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

men of the country a similar humiliating confes- 
sion. 

5. Daniel was tempted also by his absence from 
home and native land. The tour of Europe has 
broken down the principles, and broken up the 
habits, of multitudes from America. Paris is a 
volcanic vortex to scores of American medical stu- 
dents. One such, when his ruin was complete, 
beyond hope of recovery, used his medical knowl- 
edge as a means of reckoning how many years his 
broken constitution could bear the excesses to 
which he had become addicted. " I know," said 
he, " that I can enjoy life in my own way about 
so many years. I shall parcel out my fortune to 
last so long a time, and no longer. When my 
time is up, my revolver shall end all. No long 
decline for me. Dying is wretched business, and 
shall be soon over." Parisian life had given him 
both his habits and his ethics. 

A young man does not know how much of the 
real grit of right principle he has in him till he 
goes away from home, and lives where nobody 
knows him; where he can live anyhow, and do 
any thing, and yet come silently back, and his old 
friends shall be none the wiser. Alas ! many such 
young men have brought back seared consciences 
and hardened hearts, and habits of self-indulgence 
which have doomed them to a drunkard's grave. 

Yet this form of temptation the young Hebrew 
statesman did not escape. He met it in its most 



ANCIENT MODEL OF TEMPERANCE. 179 

urgent form. He was not only in a foreign land, 
in the Paris of the ancient world, in the court of a 
king, associating with corrupt young nobles and 
aristocratic pleasure-seekers, but he was a captive. 
He had no home. His own country, as an inde- 
pendent kingdom, was blotted from the map of 
Asia. Judaea was to Asia what Poland is to Eu- 
rope, — nationally and politically it had ceased 
to be. 

Polish nobles to-day, in the capitals of Europe, 
seek to drown their memory of their country's 
wrongs. If anybody could find palliation of in- 
temperate habits, they can find it in their national 
misfortunes. Just that form of intense temptation 
young Daniel encountered at the age of twenty- 
one. 

Put now all these things together, — youth, 
social usage, official rank, professional interests, 
absence from home and native land, and the mor- 
tifications of captivity, — and where, hi modern 
life, can you find a case of stronger temptation to 
a self-indulgent and pleasure-seeking career ? 

II. Pass we now to observe what was the young 
nobleman's conduct in the trial. 

1. He was true to his faith in abstinence from 
the use of wine. Let us not muddle ourselves here 
with irrelevant matters. Whether or not wine- 
drinking is a sin per se ; whether or not a pledge 
to abstain is a duty ; whether or not membership 
of a temperance society is wise ; whether or not 



180 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTA MENT. 

wine is more innocent than rum ; whether this, 
that, or the other is the wisest policy, — do not at 
all concern the point in hand. 

The point is, that the young prophet had a prin- 
ciple of his own on the subject, and adhered to it. 
He believed, no matter why, that for him wine 
was a forbidden luxury ; and he stuck to that con- 
viction. He was not cajoled out of it by selfish 
interests nor by side issues. A remarkable thing 
about him is the absence of casuistry. He makes 
no attempt to hoodwink his conscience. He 
accepts it as a plain case. Duty settled, every 
thing is settled. He will be true to that, though 
the heavens fall. Not one of the inducements he 
had to twist his conscience awry, and create for 
himself an exceptional case, has a feather's weight 
with him. His friend and superior talks of the 
danger of losing his head. He retreats none the 
more for that. 

Yet he does not bluster. He does not even say 
much of conscience. He does not fling his con- 
victions in the face of his friends. He does not 
browbeat those who differ from him. Not a word 
appears which implies that he thought wine- 
drinking a sin in them. Heads shall be saved, and 
friendships kept intact, if it may be honestly done. 
It deserves emphasis, that, in fidelity to his own 
convictions, he did no violence to those of others. 
In becoming a reformer he did not cease to be a 
gentleman. 



ANCIENT MODEL OF TEMPERANCE. 181 

2. Daniel was true to the education o£ his child- 
hood. His convictions were doubtless the fruit of 
early training. He is not ashamed of that. He 
indulges in no swagger about the bigotry of his 
father, and the narrow mind of his teachers. He 
does not plead that now he has come to manhood 
he must act for himself, and will not be bound by 
the usage of his father's house. 

Young men sometimes break away from the tem- 
perate principles and habits of their youth on this 
plea of personal independence. They boast that 
they have attained to greater breadth of view 
than the fathers had. Ah, yes ! breadth of view. 
" Broad views," I have observed, are but the gild- 
ed gateway to the " broad road." They remind me 
of the young man of whom I have somewhere 
read, who would no longer read the Bible which 
he had been taught to revere, "because," he said, 
"it has such a mess of Presbyterian bigotry in it." 
Daniel is gulled by no such nonsense. He will 
put his foot into no trap of self-conceit which 
Satan may set to catch the vanity of youth. 

He has been educated to do right, and of that 
he is not ashamed. His conduct is clearly in con- 
trast, and is meant to be, with the customs of the 
society around him. Jerusalem against Babylon : 
that is the gist of it. His father's house stands 
over against the court of the king. The training 
of his childhood is pitted against the corruption 
of the heathen capital. Jew against Pagan : when 



182 



STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



it comes to that, he stands manfully by the tradi- 
tions of his own kindred and the home of his in- 
fancy. His silent soliloquy is, " Mine be the God 
of my fathers, mine the old songs of my country's 
faith, mine the prayers that my mother taught 
me." 

3. He was true also to the principle of temperance 
as a religious virtue. The drinking customs of 
Babylon often meant more than they seemed to 
mean. They were saturated with the virus of 
idolatry. A Chaldsean dinner-party was a sacrifice 
to the gods of the kingdom, as were afterwards 
the social entertainments of Greece and Rome. 
If a state banquet were given at the palace, instead 
of inviting the young Hebrew to dine with the 
princes of the realm, the invitation would read in 
some such form as this : " His Majesty the King 
commands the presence of Belteshazzar at a sacri- 
fice to BafcL" 

It became, therefore, a very essential element in 
the policy of the prophet-statesman, that it should 
be pervaded by the dignity of his religion. The 
idolatrous banquet at the palace must be met by 
the religious temperance of the guest. Thus Dan- 
iel practised temperance as a religious virtue, — 
nothing less. He put it on the basis of a religious 
scruple. " He purposed in his heart that he would 
not defile himself with the king's meat and wine." 

Language cannot well express more truthfully 
the fundamental principle of the temperance re- 



ANCIENT MODEL OF TEMPERANCE. 183 

form. The virtue it inculcates is a religious vir- 
tue. It is a religious reform, or it is nothing. Its 
opposite involves moral defilement, to which no 
young man of lofty and pure spirit will subject 
himself. Pure manhood in this thing needs to 
respect itself with much of the delicacy of chaste 
womanhood. Both revere the sacredness of the 
human body. They treat it as the temple of God. 
Rarely do young men maintain their position as 
the friends of temperance on any less holy ground. 

Said the Bishop of Calcutta, on the platform of 
a native society for the improvement of Hindoo 
morals, " If you wish to make any thing eternal, 
you must build it on the Christian religion. That 
is the only thing in this world that is eternal." 
He was right. No reform is worth its cost, which 
is not important enough to rise to the level of a 
religious duty. Make it that, to the consciences of 
men, and it will live. Make it less than that, and 
men may play with it for a day, but will never 
build it into any thing that can live to future ages. 

4. The prophet also calmly trusted the conse- 
quences of his procedure to God. There is some- 
thing sublime, as there always is in such phenom- 
ena, in the assurance of this youthful hero that he 
may trust the end with an unseen Power. He has 
only to do his duty amidst the intricacies of his 
lot, and an invisible Friend will care for the rest. 
He has no fear of losing his head. If he must 
lose it, be it so. There is another thing which he 



184 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

fears more. He asks for but ten days, however, 
to show who is in the right. He will stake his 
chances on ten days of prayer. A short time often 
shows on which side of things God stands. The 
powers which prayer brings to the front often 
move quickly. God loves speed in decisions for 
him. 

The great thing which a young man needs in a 
crisis of temptation is to declare for the right 
quickly. Leave no time for temptation to accu- 
mulate. Then intrust consequences to God. It 
often requires a great deal of character to do that ; 
not only a religious principle, but a strong charac- 
ter back of that. To be content, in a crisis, with 
the single thought of duty, is one of the grandest 
things in history. Yet a child can do it. God 
never disappoints that trust. When a young man 
throws himself headlong into the sea of tempta- 
tion, with only the one spar of duty to lay hold 
of, God is there to uplift and bear him over the 
billows. In grasping duty, he grasps a living and 
almighty hand. 

There is an old book, yet extant in some of our 
libraries, which tells the story of an old man who 
was the warrior-poet of his tribe. He had seen 
much of life, and been conversant with many lands. 
He had stood in the cottages of shepherds and in 
the courts of kings : dens and caves were not un- 
known to his checkered career. The literature of 
his age was familiar to him : he had been no mean 






ANCIENT MODEL OF TEMPEEANCE. 185 

contributor to its treasures. At length when, near 
the end of his days, his countrjonen gathered rev- 
erently around him to listen to the wisdom of the 
old soldier in the forms of Eastern song, he 
summed up the result of his long experience of the 
ways of God with men in these words : " I have 
been young, and now am old, yet have I not seen 
the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." 
When a young man is called to hazard something 
that is dear to him at the call of duty, he can find 
in all the literature of the ages no anchor that 
grapples more securely in the storms of life than 
this testimony of the old man of Mount Zion. 

III. What were the results of Daniel's fidelity 
in his own experience ? These must now be said 
in few words. By his temperance he gained a 
healthy body. It gave him athletic sinews and 
pure blood. It secured to him what many young 
men value more, — a fresh complexion and the look 
of manly courage. No blotches on his face blabbed 
of secret vices. His was a countenance before 
which a pure woman's eye would not fall. He 
gained also that "richest boon of a good man's 
life," — an unsullied conscience. He slept and 
waked, and waked and slept, at peace with God. 

In that brief trial of his youth, he laid the foun- 
dation of a robust, religious manhood. He laid 
then the train which led to a long and splendid 
career of courtly usefulness. The mysterious 
power which subsequently closed the mouths of 



186 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

lions for his safety began at this time to gather 
around his person. In this early and brief frag- 
ment of his life, he settled the future of his pro- 
fessional career as a prophet of the living God. 
Those ten short days secured to him a place in 
the world's history, in which he is destined to live 
in the grateful and reverent affections of mankind 
forever. Who cares now for the Chaldsean mon- 
arch and his haughty court? They live to-day 
in the world's memory only because this young 
Hebrew seer has condescended to speak of them. 
As one of the authors of the word of God, and 
one of the great actors in the history of God's 
Church, he is to live while time lasts. Men of all 
ages will inquire for him in heaven. They will 
point him out, one to another, as the interpreter 
of the "handwriting on the wall." Children 
there will seek him out as " the man of the lions' 
den." The redeemed of all times will revere him 
as one of God's great ministers and chosen friends. 
The foundation of this magnificent destiny, ex- 
tending into two worlds, was built far back in 
those few days — not longer than a boy's holidays 
— in which the character of the young man was 
proved, and his principles tried, as a friend of tem- 
perance and the child of conscience. 









THE LOST BIBLE. 

And when they brought out the money that was brought into 
the house of the Lord, Hilkiah the priest found a book of the 
law of the Lord given by Moses. And the king commanded 
Hilkiah, and Ahikam the son of Shaphan, and Abdon the son of 
Micah, and Shaphan the scribe, and Asaiah a servant of the 
king's, saying: Go, inquire of the Lord for me, and for them that 
are left in Israel and in Judah, concerning the words of the book 
that is found: for great is the wrath of the Lord that is poured 
out upon us, because our fathers have not kept the word of the 
Lord, to do after all that is written in this book. — 2 Chron". 
xxxiv. 14, 20, 21. 

THE apocryphal historian of Judaea extols the 
memory of King Josiah as being " sweet as 
honey in all mouths, and as music at a banquet 
of wine." This Oriental eulogy is due largely to 
his agency in the recovery of the lost Bible of his 
kingdom. 

Few more remarkable events can happen in a 
nation's history than the loss of the sacred book 
of its religion. Nations have deliberately aban- 
doned the faith of their fathers, and adopted a 
new religion. But the loss of a religion from a 
nation's memory, so that its sacred book, when 
recovered, is welcomed as a novelty, is an event 
seldom if ever paralleled outside of Judsean annals. 

187 



188 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

The remedy of such a loss is justly regarded as 
the great event of the reign of Josiah. 

Scarcely can a more sublime scene for a great 
historic painting be conceived of, than that of this 
youthful monarch, standing amidst the assembled 
magnates of his kingdom, and leaning against a 
pillar of the temple, while he reads to the aston- 
ished crowd brought together by the news of the 
discovery, the whole book of Deuteronomy, from 
beginning to end. 

No wonder that the devout monarch rent his 
robe, and the people were overwhelmed at the 
anathemas which they had brought down upon 
themselves and their children by permitting the 
religion of their fathers to pass utterly out of the 
traditions of the kingdom. 

We may make an instructive use of this scene, 
by inquiring ivhat we should lose if we should part 
with the Christian Scriptures and with all the insti- 
tutions and blessings for which we are indebted to 
them. We appreciate a treasure most thoroughly 
when we have lost it. We realize the value of a 
fortune, of health, of a friend, of a good name, 
most keenly, when they have gone from us. 
" Blessings brighten as they take their flight." 

Infidels often charge us with childishness in 
loving our Bible as we do. " Why care so much 
for a booh?" they say; "why revere so devoutly 
an antiquated volume which the world has out- 
lived, whose fables children marvel at, and wise 



THE LOST BIBLE. 189 

men laugh at ? " The best answer to these things 
is to imagine that the world had lost " the book," 
and had lost with it all that it has given to man- 
kind. Would that be a thing for wise men to 
laugh at, and wits to jeer at ? 

1. In the loss of the Bible and its fruits, we 
should lose the knowledge of the true God. History 
proves this beyond reasonable dispute. An un- 
answerable argument for the fact of a revelation 
from God, is the fact that the world needs one to 
assure it that there is a God. God must speak, 
or man does not find him. Men are like lost 
children searching in the darkness for their father 
and their father's house. He is searching for them 
too ; but they do not recognize him till they hear 
his voice, calling their names in the wilderness or 
in the fog. When we are taunted with the fact 
that ours is the religion of a book, the answer is 
sufficient, that mankind needs a book to keep alive 
in the earth the knowledge of a spiritual and per- 
sonal God. Blot out the Bible and its effects from 
the world's history, and we fall back by slow but 
sure gradations into the condition of the most de- 
based of African tribes. Serpents and monkeys 
become our deities. We are fortunate above many, 
of our fellow-men, if we rise so high as to pray to 
the golden globe of fire which rises every morning 
over our eastern hills. 

2. By the loss of the Scriptures and their results 
from the knowledge of mankind, we should lose, 



190 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

sooner or later, our institutions of benevolence. 
Benevolence on any large scale, and in the form 
of permanent institutions, and for all classes of 
mankind, is a biblical idea. Hospitals, asylums 
for the insane, retreats for the fatherless and for 
widows, and the thousand kindred forms in which 
charity to the unfortunate and the poor has ex- 
pressed itself in Christian lands, are among the 
trophies of the Christian Scriptures. 

The sporadic and fitful attempts of charity to 
express itself in heathen institutions do not de- 
serve mention by the side of the beneficent rec- 
ords of Christianity. A heathen philosopher, once 
visiting the country, was conducted through many 
of our public buildings. When he had received 
our hospitality, and was about to return, he said 
to a friend, "Your prisons, and your dungeons, 
and your scaffolds, and your armies, I understand : 
my country can outdo you in such things; but 
your orphan-asylums and old men's homes aston- 
ish me, and your homes for old women would 
seem to my people ridiculous." 

Even De Tocqueville, coming from a papal 
country, where the Scriptures are padlocked, was 
amazed to see charity extended in this Bible land 
to criminals. Our societies for reform of prison 
discipline were a novelty to him. Said he, "In 
my country, once a rascal, always a rascal. You 
do things differently." Yes, we do things taught 
by the example of Him who ate with publicans 
and sinners. 



THE LOST BIBLE. 191 

It would be an exaggeration to say that charity, 
in the form of almsgiving, cannot exist without 
the Bible. Heathenism has often made that a 
condition of salvation. Hospitals and houses of 
refuge are not unknown to Buddhism. But 
charity systematized, charity extended into all the 
sinuosities of social life, charity founded on the 
principle of the common brotherhood of man, can- 
not exist where the Bible is unknown. The 
brotherhood of man is a biblical idea. It is re- 
vealed from heaven. The popular mind of the 
race has never originated it when left to work out 
its own theories of society. Moreover, even such 
forms of benevolence as do exist in heathen lands 
do not stand the assaults of human selfishness, in 
the long-run, unless re-enforced by the religion of 
the Scriptures. The drift of heathen civilization 
is downward, not upward. Nothing but the word 
of God has restorative force enough, as a humaniz- 
ing and civilizing power, to arrest that decline, 
and give to the principle of benevolence a perma- 
nent and sovereign sway in social institutions. 

A pamphlet lies upon my table, of more than 
three hundred octavo pages, which contains little 
else than the titles, with brief explanatory notes, 
of the charitable institutions of the city of New 
York alone. The combined literatures of Greece 
and Rome never produced a volume like that. 
They never could. The ancient republics con- 
tained in their palmiest days no material for the 
production of such a work. 



192 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Infanticide, the exposure of superannuated par- 
ents, slavery, human sacrifices, and cannibalism, 
are ultimately the usages and institutions in which 
human nature expresses the drift of its selfish in- 
stincts when untaught by a revelation from God. 
It requires only time enough for those instincts to 
come to their maturity in a finished depravity, to 
work out the extinction of organized benevolence. 
Over against such results, we now find more than 
ten thousand charitable associations in the single 
State of New York. Every one of these would 
pass out of existence if we should strike out of 
the civilization of the Empire State the Christian 
Scriptures and their natural products. 

The State of Massachusetts has expended more 
than two millions of dollars upon a single asylum 
for the insane. Banish the Bible from the schools 
and the homes and the character of Massachusetts, 
and in less than the life of three generations we 
should have here a people to whom taxation for 
such a purpose, beyond the need of caging the 
insane like tigers, would be denounced as tyranny. 
It is not yet a hundred years since the insane and 
wild beasts were treated alike in some parts of 
Europe. Strike out the Bible from our history, 
and every such asylum, and all kindred institutions 
with which the State is dotted from Berkshire to 
the sea, would give place to institutions and cus- 
toms of organic selfishness, and ultimately of bar- 
barian cruelty. The spirit of the Bible must be 



THE LOST BIBLE. 193 

in the homes of a people, and its sacred words 
on the lips of their children, and its humane 
spirit in their hearts, before society and govern- 
ment can develop themselves on any large scale 
in the forms of organized benevolence. 

Conceive, then, of a sovereign state in which, 
from end to end, should be found not one hospital ; 
not one retreat for the insane ; not one home for 
friendless and aged women ; not one asylum for 
orphans; not one house for abandoned children; 
not one infirmary for incurable invalids ; not one 
asylum for the blind; not one refuge for fallen 
women ; not one school for the deaf and dumb ; 
not a spot where Laura Bridgman could find a 
friend ; not one institution for the care of idiots ; 
not one provident society ; not one almshouse ; not 
one sanitarium for the cure of inebriates ; not one 
association for the employment of street- Arabs ; 
not one mission-school ; not one sewing-school ; not 
one society for the protection of emigrants ; not one 
home for sailors, not one for soldiers ; not so much 
as one little " Shoe and Stocking Society," such as 
once honored the North End of Boston, — conceive, 
I say, of such a sovereign commonwealth, and, in 
place of these, imagine it dotted all over, as it 
must be, with prisons and penitentiaries and scaf- 
folds and pillories and whipping-posts, with rum- 
shops at .every corner to furnish material for these 
grim expedients of justice ; and you have some 
faint picture of what Massachusetts would be if 



194 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

she could have existed at all without the infusion 
of the Bible as her life-blood into the framework 
of her civilization. 

3. In the loss of the Bible and its fruits, we 
should sooner or later suffer the loss of our institu- 
tions for popular education. Here, again, it would 
be untrue to say that heathenism is of necessity 
and always barbarism. Culture has existed without 
a revelation from heaven. Schools are ■ not the 
product of the Bible only. But it is beyond 
question, that popular education is of biblical ori- 
gin. Besides the impotence of heathenism to 
sustain even such culture as it creates, and to 
prevent the relapse of the race into barbarian 
ignorance, it is a truism that other than Christian 
religions build themselves on the ignorance of the 
masses. Even Greek and Roman civilization — 
the most brilliant that man ever framed without 
the aid of a revelation — knew no such thing as 
that which we understand by the education of the 
people. Cicero was perhaps, on the whole, the 
most enlightened and liberal statesman the world 
ever saw outside of the biblical circle of civiliza- 
tion. Yet no man has ever lived in whose mind 
was more profoundly rooted the aristocratic idea 
that education is for the few, and ignorance for 
the many ; ease and leisure for the few, and toil 
and slavery for the many. 

Heathenism everywhere assumes that the people 
exist to be governed, and that, to be governed 



THE LOST BIBLE. 195 

well, they must be kept in ignorance. Voltaire 
betrayed his want of the biblical idea of culture 
in saying, " The people must have bread and 
amusement. But do not teach them to reason." 

The drift of culture without the spirit of the 
Bible in the heart is seen in the hostility of the 
ancient governor of Virginia to the spirit of New 
England, which he expressed by thanking God 
that Virginia had no free schools, and praying that 
she might never have such "pests." That is 
human nature when educated in ignorance of or 
hostility to the spirit of the Scriptures. 

Witness the testimony of the Komish Church. 
Locking up the Scriptures and fighting free schools 
go hand in hand. The Vatican has one of the 
most costly libraries in Italy ; but a traveller who 
visits it sees only the blind oaken doors which 
shut it in. Education there is for the few only, 
and for them only by permission of authority. So 
it is the world over. The free Bible and the free 
school stand and fall together. 

Add to this the putrescent tendencies of society, 
when not counteracted by the antiseptic power 
of Christianity, and the inevitable sequence of 
the loss of the Scriptures must be the loss of all 
that should deserve the world's respect in popular 
education. Imagine, then, the State of Virginia, 
with the prayers of Sir William Berkeley an- 
swered. Picture to your fancy the Old Dominion 
with not one schoolhouse in all its broad domain ; 



196 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

not one college or university or seminary for either 
sex, which should be open to free access from the 
lower and middle classes of society. Imagine that 
it had not one newspaper printed in the mother 
tongue; not one free library; not one popular 
lyceum ; not a popular lecture given on either side 
of the Blue Ridge from year's end to year's end ; 
not an institute of teachers ever held there ; not 
one printing-press for the publishing of popular 
information ; not so much as a Farmer's Almanac 
seen anywhere ; not a speech delivered from the 
stump to enlighten the people in their civil duties ; 
not a post-office open to any but dignitaries of the 
State ; not a telegraph-pole erected within its 
borders: in a word, give back the old Virginia 
plantations to the savages from whom they were 
bought or plundered, and you get some dim idea 
of what a great country like ours would be if the 
word of God were expunged from its history. 
That our land is any thing better than that to-day, 
as the abode of popular science and general cul- 
ture, we owe to the fact that Sir William's prayers 
were not answered, but a free Bible was left to 
work out its own fruits in a free press and free 
schools. 

4. By the loss of the Scriptures and their crea- 
tions, we should sooner or later part with our in- 
stitutions of civil liberty. History shows that the 
great charter of freedom in the world is the word 
of God. The great free nations of the earth are 



THE LOST BIBLE. 197 

the great Christian nations. And of those the 
most free are the great Protestant peoples who 
keep God's word clear from the dominion of priests. 
The institutes of Moses are marvellously imbued 
with the principles of our own republic. The 
principle of our town-meeting is found in one 
of the provisions of the Mosaic code for the gov- 
ernment of the people. A volume has been written 
to show the republicanism of the civil constitution 
given by the great Jewish lawgiver. Where, 
think you, did Thomas Jefferson get the idea of 
democratic government which he embodied in the 
Declaration of Independence? From an obscure 
Baptist church in the backwoods of Virginia. 

Yes, if you would imagine a land from whose 
civilization the Bible and its products are wholly 
lost, and faded from the people's memory, you 
must conceive of a land of slaves and tyrants ; a 
land without a written constitution; without a 
declaration of independence ; without a bill of 
rights ; without trial by jury ; without an elective 
franchise ; without a jurisprudence framed to guard 
the liberties of the citizen; without courts and 
tribunals organized and managed in the interests 
of equal justice ; without legislatures representative 
of the popular will ; without one of that galaxy of 
institutions and unwritten laws which we deem 
the glory of our Republic. Every one of these we 
owe ultimately to the Christian Scriptures. 

My space fails me. It was my purpose to show 



198 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

that the loss of the Bible and its fruit from the 
world would involve the destruction of peace and 
its attendant blessings; that ivar would become 
ultimately the chronic condition of society; that 
the modern idea of the family would be lost ; that 
the institution of marriage, as we understand it, 
would cease to be ; that woman would be reduced 
to servitude ; that home would lose its holy mean- 
ing ; that infanticide would be restored ; that hw- 
man sacrifices to infernal deities would become the 
prevalent form of religious service; that protec- 
tion against desolating pestilences would become 
impossible ; that cannibalism would live again ; 
and, in a word, that the tendencies of the human 
race to barbarism in its most brutal forms would 
be revived, and that its natural career would be 
towards its own extinction on this globe. The 
whole earth would be subjected at last to the 
destiny which overtook and had well-nigh over- 
whelmed the savage tribes of this Western conti- 
nent when Christianity found them two hundred 
and fifty years ago, and towards which the best 
civilization of the world was drifting when Christ 
was born. 

One of the great poets has portrayed the scene 
in which light should be banished from the uni- 
verse. He describes the blotting out of stars and 
moons and suns ; this earth still wandering in the 
blackness of the universal dark. He pictures men 
living by watch-fires. They burn up their forests, 



THE LOST BIBLE. 199 

their cities, their homes, their temples, and all 
holy things, to create a light by which to see each 
other's faces, and get warmth against the growing 
intensity of cold. Commerce dies ; its once famous 
marts crowded with the products of distant lands 
are forsaken: not so much as a blade of grass 
grows in the deserted streets. Ships rot in their 
harbors. Sails which have whitened every sea 
flap idly in the dead night air. Men grow wolfish 
in the universal woe. They curse each other, and 
gnash their teeth, and howl for one ray of light. 
Mothers turn savagely upon their youngest-born. 
No love, no family, no home, survives. Temples 
of religion there are none ; and, as for God, men 
have forgotten but to curse him and die. 

Gradually the whole globe becomes depopulated. 
It rolls in space without inhabitants save two sur- 
vivors, and they are mortal foes. They scrape to- 
gether a fagot and a few dried leaves, and blow 
them to a blaze, that they may once see each 
other's faces. Then with one look of frenzied 
hate, and a shriek of maniacal fury, impotent to 
wreak itself except upon itself, they expire. So 
human history is ended. Not a hand is left to roll 
up the map of nations. 

" The world is void, 

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless, 

A lump of Death." 

Such a world would this earth become if the 



200 



STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



light of the word of God were once put out, and 
all that it has done to illumine and elevate and 
civilize and refine and redeem mankind were 
blotted forever from its history. Such would be 
the consequence of a final and irremediable loss 
of the Bible. 



GOOD MEN WHO ARE NOT CHURCHMEN. 

And Jeremiah said unto the house of the Rechabites, Thus 
saith the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Because ye have 
obeyed the commandment of Jonadab your father, and kept all 
his precepts, and done according unto all that he hath com- 
manded you; therefore thus saith the Lord of hosts, the God 
of Israel: Jonadab the son of Rechab shall not want a man 
to stand before me forever. — Jer. xxxv. 18, 19. 

THE foregoing title expresses in brief the lead- 
ing practical idea which we derive from this 
biblical fragment about the Rechabites. Opin- 
ions may not unreasonably differ about this singu- 
lar people. But as I understand the scriptural 
notices of them, they were not Israelites by birth, 
nor included in the covenant of God with his 
peculiar people. Yet they were good men. They 
recoiled from the wickedness of the world around 
them. They sought, as men are in all ages prone 
to do, to find protection in ascetic vows. 

They saw, for instance, that intemperance was 
a great and damning vice : therefore they vowed 
that they would drink no wine. They correspond 
very nearly, in that respect, to the modern societies 
of " Good Templars" and " Sons of Temperance ; " 
that is, they were pledged to the practice of total 

201 



202 STUDIES OF TlfE OLD TESTAMENT. 

abstinence ; yet were not, by virtue of that vow, 
members of the church of God. 

They saw, also, that" the great cities of the 
world were the chief centres of corruption : there- 
fore they vowed to live forever in tents. Their 
ancestor and founder, Jonadab, was a Bedouin 
Arab, as we should call him. The desert was his 
home, and the tent his dwelling. It was a vow of 
the sect to live so forever. 

They observed, also, that the possession of fixed 
property was a great temptation to men. They 
would therefore have none of it. Every man 
bound himself not to own a house, not to buy a 
field, not to till a vineyard. Like the Dominicans 
and others of the Romish Church, they took the 
vow of poverty, so far as these forms of worldly 
estate were concerned. They would escape sin by 
fleeing from temptation. That was their principle. 

These three things seem to have been the creed 
of the sect : to drink no wine ; to own no fixed 
property; to dwell in no permanent abodes. 
Their organization as a tribe was clearly an at- 
tempt to live a purer life than the world around 
them, by cultivating the simple tastes and habits 
of herdsmen, living in tents, wandering wherever 
they could find pasturage, being much in the open 
air, and at night sleeping under the resplendent 
skies of Arabia. 

But what have these ancient " Good Templars " 
to do with the mission of Jeremiah to the kingdom 



GOOD MEN WHO ARE NOT CHURCHMEN. 203 

of Judah? Just this, and no more : they are used 
as a means of reproof. They were faithful to 
their vows: the Jews were not. They adhered 
to the religion of their fathers : the Jews did not. 
They were practically better men and women than 
the average of the world: the Jews were not. 
They kept themselves clear from the corruptions 
of the great metropolitan cities : the Jews did not. 
They practised the virtues of temperance, of plain 
living, of frugality, and the kindred virtues of 
country life : the Jews had given themselves up to 
the extravagance and the idolatrous vices of the 
great capitals. So far as we know, they worshipped 
the true God : the Jews had become so corrupt as 
to worship a calf, a goat, a lizard, any thing that 
anybody worshipped $ they followed the fashions 
in their religion. 

The prophet therefore uses these " Good Tem- 
plars " as a means of shaming the men of Judah 
for their wickedness and apostasy. I do not under- 
stand that he means to give the divine approval to 
them as a sect ; or to set the divine seal upon their 
vows, as necessary to holy living ; nor even to de- 
fend their total abstinence. It is a stretch of bibli- 
cal authority, to make this fragment an argument 
for the divine authority of temperance-societies. 
Other scriptures may support them, but not this 
one. 

The prophet seems to say to the apostate Jews, 
" Look, you renegade people of God, look at these 



204 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT; 

Rechabites ! Are you not ashamed of yourselves ? 
They have not had half of your privileges, but 
they outdo you in right living. They are consist- 
ent with their professions. They stick to their 
vows. They live up to the light they have. You 
do neither. Therefore, by the authority given me 
by the living God, I tell you that God will bless 
them, and will curse you." 

This I take to be the simple purpose of this 
introduction of the Rechabites into the word of 
God. In a nutshell, the design is to reprove bad 
men in the Church by contrasting them with good men 
out of the Church. The value of such a fragment 
in the Scriptures for practical use in all ages may 
be seen by a brief notice of the following hints : — 

1. The popular criticism upon the Church is 
true : " Better men are out of it than some men in 
it" There are bad men in the Church, and very 
imperfect good ones. Men profess religion who 
will cheat in a trade, who will lie to cover the 
cheat, who will take a false oath to bolster the lie. 
Name almost any crime that quick-witted deprav- 
ity can invent, and doubtless it has been committed 
by some professed child of God. Prudent mer- 
chants refuse credit to a man who pleads his 
standing in the Church as a reason for giving him 
credit. Christian ministers, too, have done their 
full share of deeds which have pierced the heart 
of Christ. The chivalrous and manly virtues in 
some men overbalance the Christian graces in 



GOOD MEN WHO ARE NOT CHURCHMEN. 205 

some other men. There are " Good Templars " 
and "Odd Fellows "and "Free Masons" who 
make their fraternities substitutes for the Church, 
and we cannot say that the substitution is not 
plausible. 

When the world charges us with these contrasts, 
we admit them. When we are asked what we 
have to say for ourselves, we answer nothing in 
defence of such men, but bow our heads in shame. 
We can at best echo St. Paul's lament, and u tell 
you even weeping, that they are enemies to the 
cross of Christ." 

2. The contrast between apostates in the Church, 
and good men out of it, is an exception to the general 
fact. As the Rechabites of old were a small and 
exceptional sect, no fair representative of the hea- 
then world, so now the good men who are not 
churchmen are not a fair specimen of what men 
naturally become who live out of covenant with 
God. As in the Jewish Church there were men 
and women who were not apostates, so there are 
multitudes in the Christian Church now who do 
not deserve the charge that they are no better 
than other men. The apostates and hypocrites on 
the one side, and the good men who are not 
churchmen on the other, are both exceptions to 
the general law. It is but fair to admit this. It is 
but just to claim it. 

The very fact that the alleged contrast attracts 
attention and provokes satire is proof of this. If 



206 STUDIES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

it were the general law, that the Church makes 
men scoundrels, and that irreligion makes men the 
pattern of all the virtues, the charge of inconsis- 
tency would disappear. If it were the natural 
drift of things that clergymen should be adulterers, 
thieves, liars, drunkards, the fact would be accept- 
ed as the legitimate fruit of their profession. They 
would, as a class, stand in public esteem where 
blacklegs do now. Public opinion rests at last 
upon the facts. In the West-India Islands and in 
some parts of South America the Komish priest- 
hood have, as a class, fallen into debasing vices. 
They drink, they lie, they swear, they gamble, 
they brawl, they are licentious. They suspend 
mass to attend a horse-race. These things are so 
common that public sentiment accepts them as the 
usual accompaniments of the priestly function. 
They have long since ceased to excite remark. 
No hue-and-cry is raised when a priest is guilty 
of these things. The popular proverbs run thus : 
" As bad as a priest ; " " As drunk as a friar ; " 
" As tricky as a Jesuit," and so on. 

Such would be the popular judgment the world 
over, before long, if the fact of clerical depravity 
were universally true, or if it were generally true 
that Christian ministers are no better than the 
average of men. It is not true, and the world 
knows it. It is a calumny which no man who is 
not innately and thoroughly dishonest and mean 
will charge upon the clerical office. The man 



GOOD MEN WHO AKE NOT CHURCHMEN. 207 

who has lost faith in such a body of men and 
women as now compose the Protestant Church of 
Christendom, and large portions of the Catholic 
Church, must be a man who has lost faith in him- 
self. His loss of trust in their virtues springs 
from the loss of consciousness of those virtues in 
his own heart. He believes no better because he 
is no better. 

3. The concessions which Christians make to cyni- 
cal critics of the Church need often to be qualified 
by loyalty to the brotherhood. There is a virtue in 
loyalty to one's guild, which truth and justice 
sometimes call to the front. 

There is a tone of criticism of the Church which 
sounds very candid, and very faithful, and very 
independent of clanship, which, after all, is un- 
manly and mean, simply because it is not true. 
Underneath it, there is a truckling to the malicious 
judgment of the wicked. The faults of Christians 
are exaggerated. The numbers of the hypocritical 
are overrated. Guilt is assumed on insufficient 
evidence. Evidence which a jury would scout 
is deemed sufficient to condemn a professor of 
religion. Such accusers do not face the accused 
like men. They will swell a secret into common 
fame ; yet, when summoned to bear witness, they 
skulk. 

All nations have a proverb about "the bird 
that fouls its own nest." All honorable men 
respect loyalty to one's own. The conditions of 



208 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Christian living in this world are such as to call 
for large practice of this virtue. No other body 
of men are so sure of receiving unjust judgment 
as Christians are. To belong to the Church of 
Christ is to be a mark for cynics to hawk at, and 
for vultures to peck at. In simple fair play, the 
Church needs the magnanimous graces among its 
own members. Does not everybody know a pro- 
fessing Christian who has the inconsistencies of 
his brethren at his tongue's end always, and their 
excellences never? That brother should look 
into " trades-unions " and " Masonic lodges," for 
a lesson in loyalty. 

I have somewhere read a legend of a wretched 
man, one of nature's monstrosities, the tip of 
whose tongue was a snake's head. In his sleep 
the hideous reptile lay coiled within; but Ms 
breathing was a low and ominous hiss. When 
he woke, and attempted to speak, the monster 
thrust itself out in wavy vibrations, hissing, 
biting, stinging. A fitting symbol this of men 
who can never find a good thing to say of the 
Church of Christ. Inspired imagery resembles 
the revolting legend : " They have sharpened 
their tongues like a serpent ; adder's poison is 
under their lips." Shall brethren in Christ thrust 
such venomous fangs at each other? When 
tempted to misanthropic judgment of a Christian 
brother, remember the snake-headed tongue. The 
truth is that conscious hypocrites in the Church 
are comparatively few. 



GOOD MEN WHO ARE NOT CHURCHMEN. 209 

And what of ministers of the gospel ? I have 
elsewhere spoken of the inconsistencies of the 
Church and her ministry with sufficient fidelity. 
May I now offset it with a bit of testimony? 
True, it is interested testimony : but no other can 
be founded on knowledge of the facts; it must 
pass for what it is worth. For more than thirty 
years I have known the clerical profession as no 
man can know it who is not in it and behind the 
scenes. With more or less of personal intimacy, 
I have known nearly two thousand preachers of 
the gospel. I know their #ims, their motives, 
their methods, their weaknesses, their policies, 
their secrets ; for every profession has its honora- 
ble secrets and its wise policies. And my con- 
viction is that there is not another body of men 
living, of equal numbers, the record of whose 
life, public and private, will bear scrutiny so 
well as theirs. The testimony which the Earl of 
Shaftesbury publicly gave to the character of the 
American missionaries in Western Asia, in 1860, 
"they are a marvellous combination of common 
sense and piety," is true of the great body of 
Protestant ministers whom I have known. Out 
of the whole number, but five have made a wreck 
of moral character. Of what other profession or 
guild, equal in numbers, and chosen at random, 
can that be said ? 

Similar is the testimony which any man who 
knows the facts will bear respecting the great body 



210 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

of the Church. When men claim that the Church 
as a body has done nothing to lift the standard of 
human virtue, that Christians as a whole are no 
better than other men, it is wrong by silence even 
to give in to the calumny. It is but just to the 
living and the dead to protest that it is not true. 
The facts of life do not bear out such sweeping 
censures. To concede the justice of them is treach- 
ery to men and women of whom the world is not 
worthy. It is a confession that our Lord did not 
know how to lift this world up into redeemed and 
regenerated life, when he planned the doing of it 
by the agency and example of the Church. It is 
a confession that his work, through eighteen cen- 
turies of churchly life, has been a dead failure. 
Who believes this, except those who wish to be- 
lieve it ? 

4. The virtues of good men who are not churchmen 
are due largely to the salutary influence of the Church 
upon them. The Rechabites owed their knowledge 
of the true God to the Jewish people. Their vir- 
tues were due to their association with that people, 
not to their knowledge or practice of heathenism 
and its fruits. Similar is the teaching of history 
in all subsequent ages. The virtues of the world 
in their finest growth live upon the graces of the 
Church. 

A cannon-ball, in its course through the air, 
moves, with a velocity only less than its own, a 
certain bulk of the surrounding atmosphere. That 



GOOD MEN WHO ARE NOT CHURCHMEN. 211 

" wind of the ball " is sometimes strong enough to 
knock a man flat. When you stand close to an 
express-train of cars at full speed, you feel the 
same phenomenon. Within a certain distance, 
the space around a body in quick motion is filled 
with its momentum, and the air moves as it moves. 
Similar is the moral power of the Church of Christ 
over multitudes who are taught its principles, who 
know its creed, who witness its example, and whose 
infancy was fashioned by its ordinances. They 
feel its restraining power when they do not bow 
to its saving power. 

Christian ideas govern the public opinion of the 
world to-day, though spiritual religion is by no 
means in the ascendant. It takes but a small mi- 
nority of earnest believers to carry with them the 
speculative belief of a large majority. So nations 
populous and mighty are nominally Christian to- 
day, because they contain a nucleus of spiritual 
Christians. These keep alive the Christian reli- 
gion as a power of restraint, of culture, of refine- 
ment, of civilization, of virtue, to multitudes to 
whom it is not yet a power of salvation. That 
such men are what they are, they owe to the living 
faith that is in the Church. They owe it to godly 
mothers and praying fathers, and Christian wives, 
and the recollections of their own Christian child- 
hood. That among them are found Christians in 
heart who are not such by profession, they owe to 
the more positive and consistent ones, who do not 



212 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

fear to profess before the world the faith they cher- 
ish in secret. The Church of Christ achieves thus 
a vast amount of unacknowledged conquest. 

The moral virtues in their ripened forms live in 
this world on the life-blood of the Christian graces. 
Christian sap is flowing through the whole tree of 
European and American civilization. Profound 
and far-reaching is the principle, " Ye are the salt 
of the earth." 

5. While God blesses goodness and the right 
wherever he finds them, he still depends for them 
chiefly upon the Church which he has created for all 
time. History, in this old Judsean line, seems to 
turn aside for a moment to salute respectfully these 
ancient sons of temperance. Yet it speedily re- 
turns again to the old channel of the Church of 
God. No sect is taken as a substitute for the 
Church. God does not abandon his people, and 
take up Rechabites in their stead. He knew his 
own mind when he founded the Church, and said 
to Abraham, " In thee shall all the nations of the 
earth be blessed." 

Traces are still found, in the wilds of Arabia, 
of the descendants of the ancient tribe of Jonadab, 
in fulfilment, as it is believed, of Jeremiah's proph- 
ecy. But how little has been the Rechabite influ- 
ence on the world ! We have to search biblical 
antiquities to find it. The world knows nothing 
of its history. Turn to a secular historian, and 
you find that a few lines are all that he thinks it 



GOOD MEN WHO AEE NOT CHURCHMEN. 213 

necessary to give to this ancient sect ; and those 
only because it is mentioned in the Bible. Com- 
pare the article " Rechabites " with the article 
" Christianity " in any good encyclopaedia. Just 
such is the proportion of the good that is in the 
world to the good that is in the Church, in respect 
to the strength of each as a spiritual power, and 
their value to the coming ages. 

The great stream of civilization and redemption 
has flowed down the ages of the past, not through 
any accidental and wayside canal of Rechabite or 
Masonic virtue, but through the great river-bed of 
the Christian Church. Here are the living foun- 
tains. Here are treasured the truths which the 
world most needs to know. Here are garnered 
the promises which gild with golden radiance the 
world's future. The hope of all coming time is in 
this Church of the living God. 

6. The principles we have thus briefly glanced 
at suggest that heaven is full of surprises for those 
who reach it. Said an aged clergyman when 
drawing near to that world, "I expect to find 
there some who I have never thought would get 
there ; and I expect to miss some whom I have 
supposed to be sure of it." Yes, surprises of this 
sort await us. Not every one that saith, " Lord, 
Lord," shall enter there. Many who did not say 
"Lord, Lord," will be found to have given the 
cup of cold water to some disciple. God only 
knows his own. He will gather them from the 



214 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

four winds. Not one will escape his eye. He will 
need no church-records to inform him who they 
are. He will need no marble monument to tell 
him where their dust reposes. He will need no 
epitaph to tell him what they were. Not one 
bruised reed of virtue will be broken, not one 
flickering flame or buried spark of grace put out, 
by his avenging hand, in the great day. Yet it is 
to be a " great and terrible day." Fearful disap- 
pointments will be found there. Said a devout 
but trembling saint on his death-bed, "There 
must be some tremendous examples held up to 
the universe : what if I should be one of them ! " 
It becomes us all to walk humbly before God. 
Professions of religion cannot save us. Vows in 
the Church or out of it cannot save us. The con- 
trite and believing heart , — this, and this only, is 
the place in which God dwells. This is his living 
temple. This is more to God than the pillar of 
fire and the pillar of cloud, — more than the Shechi- 
nah and the holy of holies. This is more to 
Christ than church and clergy and sacraments. 
"I heard a great voice out of heaven saying: 
Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he 
will dwell with them. God himself shall be with 
them, and be their God." 






INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS WITH 
THE PLANS OF MEN. 

But the army of the Chaldseans pursued after the king, and 
overtook Zedekiah in the plains of Jericho ; and all his army was 
scattered from him. Then they took the king, and carried him 
up unto the king of Bahylon to Riblah in the land of Hamath; 
where he gave judgment upon him. And the king of Babylon 
slew the sons of Zedekiah before his eyes : he slew also all the 
princes of Judah in Riblah. Then he put out the eyes of Zede- 
kiah; and the king of Babylon bound him in chains, and carried 
him to Babylon, and put him in prison till the day of his death. 
— Jek. lii. 8-11. 

THE title of one of the most useful of modem 
sermons is, " Every Man's Life a Plan of God." 
The story of the Judaean captivity brings to view, 
as every other great event in history does, these 

I two distinct lines of purpose, — the line of God 
and the line of man. To effect God's will in the 
fulfilment of ancient prophecy, some one man must 
take the leadership of the people. Some one man 
must head their downfall. Some one man must 
lead their sad procession into bondage. Some one 
man must, suffer there the barbarities of ancient 
warfare ; must see his children slaughtered one by 
one before his eyes ; must suffer worse than death 
in the loss of his own sight ; and must die at last 



215 



216 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

a dethroned prince, a childless father, a blind old 
man, in an enemy's country, and in a dungeon. 
Yet the great wheels of Providence moved on 
calmly and relentlessly, crushing out that one life 
as if no being in the universe cared for it. No 
friendly ear seemed to hear the death-cry of the 
victim. 

Of the many truths which the passage before 
us teaches, this mysterious intervolution of the plans 
of God with the plans of men will seem to some 
minds the most impressive. 

1. The enclosure of the plans of men within 
the plans of God is such that commonly men appear 
to be left very much to themselves. This unfortu- 
nate prince, whose lot it was to close the line of 
independent monarchs on the throne of Juclah, 
does not appear to have been overruled by any 
visible network of divine purposes, any more than 
the humblest beggar in Judaea. When the histo- 
rian came to record his life, the record would 
naturally run, " Such are the chances of war ; such 
is the fate of unfortunate princes in barbarous 
times." 

Yet all the while a plan of God enveloped him, 
which touched and checked at all points his plans, 
directed his working to God's ends, and wrought 
out over and around him a chapter of universal 
history, which was to concern the world in distant 
ages, and nations yet unborn. Nearly twenty-five 
hundred years have come and gone since then ; 



INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS. 217 

more than seventy generations have lived and 
died ; yet on the first Lord's Day of the month of 
May, this year, millions of people in many lands, 
making a belt around the globe, were pondering 
the fate of that blind old man in the dungeons of 
Chaldaea. 

Such is the sublime involution of every human 
life with the purposes of God. So noiseless is his 
working, that, when men are defeated, his agency 
is not forced upon their notice. They need not 
see him if they choose not to see him. Common- 
ly they do not see him. They say of their misfor- 
tunes, " Luck was against me." " Such are life's 
chances." " We've lost the game." 

2. In leaving men to themselves in the forming 
and working of their own plans, divine control does 
not prevent the occurrence of very shocking catastro- 
phes. Look at this miserable old Jew. His con- 
temporaries saw nothing unusual in his fate. 
That he should be vanquished in war, that he 
should be caught in his flight, that he should be 
marched into captivity, that he should be thrown 
into a dungeon, that he should be chained like a 
wolf, that his children should be butchered before 
his eyes, that those eyes should be gouged out by 
the hangman, and that he should linger out his 
wretched old age, a blind captive and a disgraced 
prince, who could only long to die, excited no sur- 
prise. That was the usage of the age. Such 
were the contingencies of royal birth, and the 



218 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

chances of war. He knew it beforehand. The 
world said of him, " He took his chances, and they 
ran against him. He played his game, and lost it. 
He probably would have treated his royal foe in 
the same way if he had gained it." 

But we read the story with blood running cold. 
It shocks our sensibilities, that any human being, 
the most insignificant in the universe, should be 
thus overridden and crushed by the spiked wheels 
of states and empires. We marvel that God 
should suffer such things. Can there be a God, 
we ask, who can permit such useless torture of a 
lone old man? A society of atheists once pub- 
lished a card on which were printed these words : 
" What becomes of God's omnipotence, if he 
would have prevented suffering, and could not ? 
What becomes of his benevolence, if he could 
have prevented suffering, and would not ? " Sure 
enough, without a revelation we cannot explain 
one such scene in the drama of one human 
life. 

Yet such is the darksome way in which God 
moves. Verily thou art a God that hidest thyself. 
He seems to keep himself aloof, in awful seclusion 
from human woes, as if the sight of them were 
either too much, or too little, for such as he. I 
go forward, but he is not there ; and backward, 
but I cannot perceive him. Does not every-day 
human life often force the cry of Job from white 
and trembling lips ? 






INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS. 219 

A young husband and wife start on their bridal 
tour. Loving and loved, their hearts open to all 
living things, the future ' seems to be one long 
golden age. In a few hours, they are dragged, 
with charred arms infolding each other's lifeless 
forms, from the ruins of the wrecked train at 
Ashtabula, and their bridal tour is ended. 

A factory building, five stories high, falls to the 
ground just after seven hundred men and women 
and children have begun their afternoon task. 
Through the oily crevices of the ruins, fire creeps 
and hisses and leaps, and coils itself around its 
helpless victims, like a swift, mad serpent. I 
stand by what were just now living and chatting 
men and women, and children whom mothers 
" kissed good-by " an hour ago. I see them now, 
still and stark, arranged in ghastly order on the 
floor of the city hall. I observe that the arms of 
many, burned to the blackened bone, have been 
thrown up to fight off the flames from their roast- 
ing faces. Oh ! can there be a God in the same 
world where such things are ? If there be one, is 
he not such as Elijah laughed at? Does he not 
tarry, talking with somebody? Is he not hunt- 
ing ? Is he not on a journey ? Is he not asleep ? 
Oh! who, what, where is he? Oh that I knew 
where I might find him ! 

A man was once drawn out insensible from the 
ruins of a railroad-train after a collision, he the 
only living one of twelve. He said that when he 



220 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

came to himself, the first thing he noticed was a 
bluebird singing merrily in a hazel-bush near by. 

On the field of Shiloh, where four thousand 
wounded and dying men lay in their blood all 
night, the blue and the gray side by side, one of 
them looked up reproachfully to the cold stars. 
"Why," thought he, "do they not veil their 
faces ? They seem to wink to each other at this 
scene of agony, as if it were the denotiment of a 
comedy." 

Yes, God does seem to leave men to their fate 
at times, as if death-throes were no concern of his. 
All happy things at such times appear to mock 
human agony with a ferocity all the more unbear- 
able because it is so still and so beautiful, yet so 
cold-blooded. Individuals are left to work out 
their own ruin. Tempters do devil's work on the 
young and the unwary. Innocent ones suffer 
with the guilty. Nations trample out nations in 
the rage of their huge passions. The millions are 
dragged under by the pride of one. Helpless 
women and little children are the victims. The 
great wheels crash into and crumple up the lit- 
tle wheels. Happy homes give place to battle- 
grounds. Wheat-fields grow rank, fertilized by 
human blood. Artillery thunders in cemeteries, 
and ploughs open graves. " Glorious victories " 
are but the pretty name of hell. So human life 
goes on. This is history. It was in view of such 
possibilities in every human life that DeQuincey 






INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS. 221 

said, " Death we can face ; but, knowing what life 
is, which of us is it, that, without shuddering, 
could, if consciously summoned to it, face the 
hour of birth?" 

3. Yet the plans of God envelop and use the 
plans of men with more than motherly tenderness for 
every man, every woman, every child. In infinite 
pity he looks down upon man, woman, child, one 
by one. The remoteness of his hiding is only the 
measure of his love. All the mystery springs 
from the fact that his melting eye looks so far 
ahead, and his soft hand reaches down to the roots 
of suffering, so far beyond our sight, or even our 
will to see. 

This truth in its fulness we owe to the Bible. 
Through the whole range of the Old Testament 
this idea runs, — that God is a personal and faith- 
ful Friend to every one who will be his friend. 
^" My God;" "my Rock;" "my Fortress;" "my 
"Deliverer;" "the God of Abraham;" "the God 
of Isaac ; " " the God of Jacob ; " " Abraham, the 
friend of God ; " " Moses, my friend ; " " ye are 
as the apple of mine eye ; " "I will do them good 
with my whole heart and with my whole soul." 
Do we venture to say, " Our Father " ? He re- 
sponds, "As one whom his mother comforteth, 
so will I comfort thee." 

The New Testament declares the same with yet 
more intense significance. A fond mother dotes 
over the glossy ringlets of her boy : he finds them 



222 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

among her garnered treasures when, in strong 
xnanhood, he has followed her to the burial. But 
God, with the affairs of a boundless universe on 
his mind, has found time to do what was never 
done by young mother to her first-born in the 
leisure of the nursery, — to number the very hairs 
on his head. We have but a faint conception of 
that love which belongs to creatorship and re- 
demption. God only knows the love of God. 

TaMng this key from God's word, we can un- 
lock the whole mystery of life, so far as suffering 
is concerned. To the eye of a good man, it is not 
so much the greatness as the minuteness of God's 
love which overwhelms him. Scientists claim that 
the microscope has revealed more of the wonders 
of nature than the telescope. So it is the micro- 
scopic look into human life which reveals the 
most marvellous loving-kindness of God. 

Let any man once give faith to the biblical 
thought of God as his personal friend, and carry it 
back to the review of his own life from infancy up, 
and he will find the evidence of divine love to him, 
as if to him only, coming in upon his soul like the 
flood of many waters. The invisible hand is seen 
in such things as these, — I select at random from 
one life only, — an old song which the mother sang 
in the Sunday twilight ; a tree, a stream, a lake, a 
mountain, which were more than friends to our 
boyhood ; a certain chance interview with a friend, 
which was rich in lifelong results ; a speech heard 



INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS. 223 

on a certain festive day; the sight of the great 
man who first awakened great aspirations within 
us; the sight of the good man who first made 
religion a reality to us ; a certain book come upon 
at hap-hazard ; a certain sermon heard long years 
ago, or one sentence in it, or the text only; the 
death of the college friend which first made heaven 
a fact to us ; the mild reproof of a certain saintly 
woman ; the first lesson in practical astronomy ; 
a Christian hymn sung somewhere in the moun- 
tains ; the* gift of a rosebud from a hand now still 
forever; a certain conversation with a stranger in 
the cars ; last words from a mother's death-bed ; a 
certain prayer heard when homesick in a foreign 
land; the mysterious delays which prevented us 
from embarking on board the ship that went down 
at sea ; a look at the Bay of Naples ; an hour in 
the Colosseum at Rome ; the hour spent in the 
" closes " of Edinburgh where Chalmers labored ; 
the Lord's Supper at Lucerne. 

Can we not all recall similar events and circum- 
stances, some of them too minute to mean much 
in the rehearsal, but which have been so inwrought 
into our subsequent life that we cannot but break 
forth sometimes into a carol of thanksgiving at 
the thought of them ? I know a man whom the 
perfume of mignonnette in the month of August 
moves to ejaculatory prayer, because it is so asso- 
ciated with a certain day and hour in August of a 
certain year in the critical period of his youth, 



224 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

when, walking in his father's garden, he gave his 
heart to Christ. 

That wounded soldier who rebuked the winking 
stars on the field of Shiloh bethought him of a 
hymn which he used to sing when a boy in the 
Sunday school. Something moved him to sing it 
again ; and he broke out with, — 

" When I can read my title clear 
To mansions in the skies," &c. 

When the third line was reached, another voice 
joined his, then another and another ; and when 
he began the second stanza, more than three hun- 
dred of those wounded men, some of them with 
faltering and dying accents, and again the gray 
and the blue together, wafted that Christian song 
over that field of blood. 

Was there no prevision of a divine eye, no plan- 
ning of a divine hand, in teaching them that hymn 
of holy triumph long years before ? Was there no 
prompting of thoughtful and tender kindness in 
their being moved to sing it then when most they 
needed it? To many of them, doubtless, it was 
more than the wings of angels, bearing them up 
to the opening heavens. 

We cannot convince a man of the reality of 
these awakening and creative influences in other 
lives, who has not felt them in his own. The 
power to see them is largely a matter of will. If 
I take a handful of steel-filings, and hold ovei 



INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS. 225 

them my ebony ruler, there is no motion. They 
lie still and dead. But if I take a magnet, that 
iron with a soul in it, and draw it slowly over 
them, every solitary particle springs in response, 
and clings to the electric metal as to a friend. So 
let a man whose faith in God is wooden review his 
own life, and he may find nothing suggestive to 
such faith. But once magnetize him with the will 
to see, and he cannot find so much as the space 
for a needle's point on which the love of God has 
not left its impress. 

To eyes once opened to this truth, it throws a 
flood of golden light over the blackest and most 
tempestuous midnight of a troubled life. Such 
a man knows that there is a God in heaven 
whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, but 
who deigns to dwell in the homes of men. You 
can neither prove it to him nor disprove it. He 
knows it. When scientists come bending under 
the weight of their learned volumes, proving be- 
yond all question that God is not, he waves them 
off, smiling as at the bugaboo which scared his 
childhood in the dark. 

4. The interlacing of the plans of God with the 
plans of men goes far towards explaining the mys- 
tery of shocking and exceptional calamity. Start- 
ing with the inexplicable fact of sin, there is little 
mystery left in any kind or degree or combinations 
of suffering. In a world overrun with sin and 
steeped in guilt as this world is, suffering is no 



228 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

mystery. It is God's great remedial antidote to 
sin. The mystery would be fearful if there were 
none. Suffering is a wonderful fertilizer to the 
roots of character. The great object of this life 
is character. This is the only thing we can carry 
with us into eternity. Benevolent discipline, there- 
fore, is aimed at the accumulating, the consolidat- 
ing, and the purifying, of character. To gain the 
most of it, and the best of it, is the object of 
probation. 

For such an object, suffering must often take on 
a surgical severity. The right hand must be cut 
off, and the right eye plucked out. Who can say 
what suffering may not have done for that wretched 
prince of Judah in the dungeons of Chaldsea? 
The butchery of his children may have been the 
only thing that could drive him back to the God 
of his fathers. Blinded eyes and chained limbs 
may have been necessary to fit him for heaven. 
Those dark days and silent nights, — at a distance 
of twenty-five hundred years one shivers at the 
thought of them, — yet they may have been a 
grand opportunity for the Spirit of God to work 
in. God may have been waiting for it for fifty 
years. The doomed sufferer, but the saved sinner, 
may now be praising God for them. It will prob- 
ably be one of the surprises of heaven, that we 
shall find there so many saved by God's loving 
use of last days, it may be of last hours, of speech- 
less suffering here. 



INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS. 227 

But what of the suffering of innocence and the 
awful inequalities of it in this world ? What of 
those helpless, butchered little children of the 
Judsean king ? Well, we admit that it is a tough 
question ; yet it is not wholly unanswerable. The 
mystery is lightened when we take in God's con- 
ception of the evil of sin. Nothing can be too 
shocking to express divine abhorrence of that. 
The more startling and mysterious that expression, 
the more natural it is. Sin itself is the great 
anomaly of the universe. God's treatment of it 
should seem to be full of anomalies, strange and 
fearful. That is just what sin calls for. Hence 
the suffering of the innocent with and for the 
guilty. Yet, to the innocent, suffering is not 
vengeance ; it is not punishment even : it is only 
the discipline which love chooses for their holy 
development. To them it is just what they are 
conscious of receiving. If conscious of no sin, 
they are conscious of no punishment. 

Have you never seen the look of age on the 
countenance of an infant in its coffin ? Suffering 
may have done rapidly the work of years of or- 
dinary life there in creating character. That 
infant's chief praise in heaven may be for the fact 
that its brief life here was one of anguish. That 
may have been the chief instrument by which God 
has lifted it above the rank of a humming-bird. 

Even when death in shocking and violent fury 
seems to overtake men unprepared, who shall say 



228 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

that infinite love, and love to them, may not have 
so ordained it ? Men who have entered the valley 
of the shadow by drowning, and have come back 
to life, tell us of a strange quickening of the soul's 
capacities in those moments of suspended vitality. 
Souls live fast in last moments. Who can say, 
then, that the Spirit of God does not avail himself 
of that law of mind, and work fast in such 
moments? At the last trump, we shall be 
changed in the twinkling of an eye. Why not as 
well in the death-gasp? Oh! you and I must 
become a great deal wiser than we are now, in 
the hidden things of wisdom, before we can ven- 
ture to raise a question even of the tenderness of 
God, in the most appalling tragedy which cold stars 
ever winked at, or merry bluebirds ever sang to 
in the hazel-bush. 

5. The interworking of the plans of God with 
the plans of men suggests the only true method of 
happy as well as holy living. It is to make our 
plans one with God's plans. Thus blessedness is 
sure for both worlds. Study God's plans ; study 
his providences ; study his word ; hearken for the 
whispers of his Spirit. Make much of still hours. 
Find out thus your place in God's purposes of 
procedure. Then drop into that place trustfully 
and contentedly. Move with his moves, start at 
his bidding, go here, go there, stay, as he directs. 
Lie still and suffer, if that be the order from 
above. Have no will but his. Pray no unquali- 






INTERTWINING OF GOD'S PLANS. 229 

fied prayers, except where lie has revealed his will. 
Never plan without taking God into confidence, 
and asking him what he thinks of it. Never con- 
tend with God in secret feeling. Give way to no 
silent longings of discontent. Indulge no reveries 
over impossible blessings. When prayer has lifted 
you into harmony with him, do not fritter it away 
by repining after-thoughts. Never look backward : 
remember Lot's wife. Our chief miseries come 
from spiritual retrogrades. In short, be at one 
with God : so shall your peace flow like a river, 
and your joy shall be like the swellings of Jordan. 



THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE, AND THE KING- 
DOM THAT LIVES. 

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up 
a kingdom which shall never be destroyed ; and the kingdom 
shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and 
consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. Foras- 
much as thou sawest that the stone was cut out of the mountain 
without hands, and that it brake in pieces the iron, the brass, the 
clay, the silver, and the gold; the great God hath made known to 
the king what shall come to pass hereafter: and the dream is 
certain, and the interpretation thereof sure. — Dan. ii. 44, 45. 

THIS enigmatical passage in the life of the 
Babylonian monarch is aptly summed up in 
the foregoing title. I must leave to the commen- 
taries the disputed interpretation of this symbolic 
language, and confine my thought to the obvious 
principle involved in it, which extends over a 
broader area. It expresses a fragment of that 
universal law by which every thing human is 
doomed to decay, but to which there is one, and 
but one, mysterious exception. 

1. The law of decay in human affairs : let us en- 
deavor to obtain some fresh conception of it, as a 
law under which every human life passes. 

(1) It is impressively illustrated in the fact that 
individuals pass so soon out of the memory of the 

230 



THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE. 231 

world. Individuals soon die, and the dead are 
soon forgotten. When a man dies, another man 
arises who will fill his place, and, as a rule, fill it 
as well as he has done. His business, his houses, 
his lands, his honors, his titles, will pass into other 
hands, and by the world at large he will not be 
missed. He will die out of the world's thought as 
thoroughly as his mouldering body passes out from 
the home which he once cheered, and from the seat 
at the table of which he was once the honored 
head. 

A man's character may live. The influence he 
exerted may pass into other lives, but not in any 
such way as to identify his name, and keep that 
alive. That dies as surely as he dies, and not long 
after. Scientists tell us that it is a law of dynamics 
that a pin dropped to the surface of the earth 
sends a concussion through the universe. But 
who hears the falling pin ? Who feels the force of 
the blow ? What sleeper is awakened by it ? Who 
identifies and remembers it ? Similar is the law of 
individual influence. It lives, indeed, through all 
time, and penetrates eternity; but the man soon 
ceases to be known as its author. His decaying 
brain is not more securely buried in the grave 
from the sight of men, than his name is, sooner or 
later, from their memory. Such is the common 
course of human life. So it has been ; so it is ; so 
it must be ; so it will be forever. 

(2) This law of decay is more impressively illus- 



232 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

trated in the fact that nations die. Why should 
not a proud and gallant nation, which has made a 
thousand years of history, make ten thousand 
more, — yes, live on forever ? The monarch of the 
East was not without some reason for his boast, 
" Is not this great Babylon, which I have built ? " 
Who shall dare to predict its downfall ? It surely, 
with its walls three hundred and fifty feet high, 
and so broad that four chariots could drive abreast 
on their summit, — it surely had the look of eter- 
nity. " The Eternal City," the Romans proudly 
called their peerless capital, — and why not ? 

Yet what is the history of great empires ? What 
but the record of the death-scenes of ■ nations ? 
The glory of one is the doom of another ; the rise 
of one, the fall of its predecessor. So uniform has 
the process been, that philosophic historians have 
believed that the history of nations is foredoomed 
to run in a circle, not in a line. Rise, growth, 
glory, decay, fall, death, seem to tell the whole 
story. History seems like one vast obituary. 

So complete is the oblivion which creeps over 
great nations, that in some cases the fact of their 
having lived is known only by melancholy infer- 
ence from the fact that they have died. Antiqua- 
rians find in the East enormous burial-places, with 
cypresses overgrowing thousands of graves, when 
every other trace of the cities which once supplied 
them with their silent population has disappeared. 
The aboriginal mounds found in some parts of our 



THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE. 233 

own continent tell a similar story. Great nations 
doubtless once lived here, of which those burial- 
mounds are the only monument now extant. Not 
a page of written history, not a hieroglyph, remains 
to tell us who and what they were : their very 
names are blotted from the knowledge of mankind 
forever. 

(3) This law of decay is illustrated instruct- 
ively in the fact that it disappoints the most plausi- 
ble plans and expectations of men. Endless are the 
expedients by which men struggle against death in 
the memory of their successors. Some have built 
pyramids ; others have fought battles ; others have 
written books or made discoveries; others have 
founded cities, libraries, schools, churches ; others 
have established families among a hereditary nobil- 
ity. How much of wasted mind has been ex- 
pended on the science of heraldry ! Yet- not one 
of these lifelong struggles has succeeded in giving 
to any man the object of his ambition. The world 
forgot, more than a thousand years ago, who built 
some of the pyramids of Egypt. Long before 
that, men had ceased to care who founded Thebes 
or Palmyra. The impressiveness of such oblivion 
sometimes borders on the ludicrous. A few years 
ago I wandered over the ruins of old Rome, and 
what think you I saw among the ruins of the fall- 
en palace of the Caesars ? A garden of cabbages ! 
The vilest of vegetables had more power to per- 
petuate its kind than he whom men once wor- 



234 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

shipped as a god, and of whom they said that a 
new star appeared in the heavens when he died. 
The only, living successor of Nero and Caligula 
was a plain Mr. Smith, who had erected on those 
ruins a red-brick house, not more imposing than 
the one in which his namesake lives in Tenth 
Street, Philadelphia, or in Houston Street, New 
York. 

Napoleon lamented that his conquests did not 
last as long as the time he occupied in making 
them. His own prediction was, that the time 
would come when all that the world would care to 
know of him would be comprised in half a page 
of history ; and he was right. Sir Walter Scott 
fell into idiocy in his almost superhuman effort to 
place himself at the head of one of the noble fam- 
ilies of Great Britain. But no child of his lives 
to inherit his honors or perpetuate his fame. That 
means of keeping alive the name of Walter Scott 
has failed forever. 

The point I would emphasize by these illustra- 
tions is the fact that the law of decay which is 
written on all things human is so imperious in its 
sway that the most ingenious and stupendous ex- 
ertions of men to achieve what they call immor- 
tality are overreached and defeated by it, and 
that therefore disappointment is written on thou- 
sands of wasted lives. The most long-lived of 
those whom the world calls immortal on the rolls 
of fame must at last accept the epitaph which the 



THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE. 235 

poet Keats suggested for his own : " Here lies one 
whose name was writ in water." 

2. But to this law of decay in human affairs 
there is one grand and marvellous exception. God 
has a kingdom in this world, which lives. 

(1) It deserves mention in illustration of this 
exception, that the work of God in redemption is 
the only thing in human history that dates hack to 
the beginning of time. God's work in this world is 
the only thing now living that goes back into 
antediluvian history. It is the only thing which 
links the whole of human history together. Other 
things fall, die, rot, by t.he side of this : this lives 
on to the world's end. 

The vanity of individuals, the ambition of fami- 
ilies, the pride of cities, the glory of nations, the 
conflicts of races, — all have been short-lived. But 
it has not been so with this work of God. For- 
tunes are dissipated in a tithe of the time which it 
requires to amass them. Commercial panics pros- 
trate merchant princes in an hour. Treasures are 
sunk in the sea or in storms of fire. The very 
highways of commerce are changed by events which 
no human foresight can provide for. Cities like 
Venice and the Hanse towns, once the centres of 
great trades, are left like stranded ships, and the 
commerce of the world flows elsewhere. King- 
doms, too, perish from the memory of men. Races 
become extinct. But it is not so with this work 
of God. 



236 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

The very sciences of the world fluctuate. The 
knowledge of one age becomes folly to the next. 
The universities of to-day laugh at those of yes- 
terday. Culture runs the gauntlet of system after 
system of philosophy, of political economy, of art, 
which seem to have been created only for the sake 
of dying. Pursuits once dignified as sciences, such 
as astrology, alchemy, magic, are exploded. But 
it is not so with this work of God. 

The world's religions, too, have succumbed to 
the same law of doom. A religious system once 
rooted in the civilization of a people is the last 
thing to die. But many such have expired. Oth- 
ers are in the process of dissolution. Even the 
languages in which men transmit their treasures 
of learning, civilization, and religion, die. What 
an appalling thing to the imagination is a dead 
language ! Every thing that man originates lives 
but a brief time in a world's life. But it is not 
so with this work of God. 

Amidst disorganizing forces that shake to pieces 
every thing else, this work lives, with the fixedness 
of the North Star. Other things bend to this: 
this never yields to them. All force in this world, 
sooner or later, yields to this unarmed and silent 
power. In every thing else the iron and the brass 
and the clay become like the chaff of the summer 
threshing-floor; while the stone cut out without 
hands is growing to a great mountain, and filling 
the whole earth. 






•THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE. 237 

(2) The contrast between the kingdoms of men 
and the kingdom of God is further seen in the 
mysterious vitality of right in this world, in its con- 
flicts with wrong. Evil, organized never so deftly, 
becomes effete. Good seems robust and always 
growing. The right, in the outset of a great 
conflict with wrong, is always underneath ; yet it 
always comes uppermost. It is never safe to an 
evil thing to agitate it. Inquiry is death to it. 
In every conflict the right gains something. It 
never loses a battle. Its drawn battles are secret 
victories. When Edmund Burke said to the first 
military and naval power of the world, " You can- 
not conquer America," he spoke a principle which 
runs through all historic struggle of wrong with 
right. 

It is astonishing what heroic deeds men who are 
not above their fellows in strength of religious 
principle will dare to undertake, if sustained by a 
consciousness of being in the right. Why are a 
dozen policemen, on the side of law, a match for 
a hundred desperadoes in a riot ? When the Con- 
tinental Congress was debating the question of 
independence of the mother-country, more than 
half the world believed it would never dare to 
do the deed. English statesmen smiled incredu- 
lously when it was threatened. When the " Decla- 
ration " was under discussion, and it was rumored 
that it would be signed that day, an old man was 
sent into the belfry of Independence Hall, in 



238 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Philadelphia, where the Congress was in session, 
and directed to strike one hundred strokes on 
" Liberty Bell " when the act was done. The old 
man sauntered up the spiral stairs muttering, 
" They will never do it ; they will never do it." 
He spoke the feeling of more than half his con- 
temporaries the world over. The hours went 
slowly by : the old man fell asleep at his post, but 
was at length roused by a shout from "State 
House yard : " " Ring, ring ! they've done it ! " 
And the hundred tongues of " Liberty Bell " told 
the world that fifty-five 1 men had defied the first 
naval power of Europe. 

They had done it at the risk of their lives. 
Every man who signed that scroll committed high 
treason. When the last name was written, a si- 
lence fell upon the assembly, in which every man 
thought of the scaffold. So oppressive was the 
stillness, that Franklin felt the need of lifting the 
mood of his colleagues to one more cheerful ; and 
he uttered the bon mot which has since become 
famous : " Now we must all hang together, or we 
shall all hang separately." 

Nothing could have sustained such men in such 
a deed but the simple consciousness that they 
were in the right. Among them were praj'ing 
men, whose thought was of the God of battles. 

1 Common history says "fifty-six." But one of the number 
was absent at the time, and was permitted to add bis name some 
time after. 



THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE. 239 

The clause near the end of the Declaration, " With 
a firm reliance on Divine Providence," was not in 
the original draft by Jefferson. It was inserted 
as an amendment by unanimous vote. That ap- 
peal to God, in behalf of right, was more to them 
than the fleets of England, which whitened all the 
harbors of the world. Right in the affairs of men 
is the synonyme of God. It lives because he lives. 
It is eternal because he is eternal. 

3. The contrast between God's kingdom and 
the kingdoms of this world is further seen in an 
anomalous suspension of the law of decay in some 
cases of historic immortality. The only men who 
are destined to live while the world lives are those 
who are in some way especially identified with the 
kingdom of Christ. The only nations which will 
escape the decline and fall which have thus far 
made up the dismal round of history are those 
which shall be given to Christ, and shall realize 
the Christian ideal of national life in the civiliza- 
tion of the future. The perpetuity of the Hebrew 
nation is the great miracle of history, unparalleled 
by the fate of any other people on the globe under 
similar conditions. They live because they were 
once, and are to be again, the chosen people of 
God in executing the purposes of redemption. 

Such exceptions are perceptible even in the ex- 
perience of individuals. Compare a good man and 
a bad man in any community, in respect to the 
memory of them which lives after them. The good 



240 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

man always lives longer, in the memory of survi- 
vors, than the bad man of the same amount of 
character, and with equal conditions of power. 
Never did inspiration utter a truer apothegm than 
in recording that " the memory of the wicked shall 
rotr 

4. Here belongs the fact that the only names 
from the remote past which in the nature of things 
can go down to the world's latest ages, are those 
which are to be immortalized by the Christian Scrij)- 
tures. 

This book is the only literature of the first times 
which can live in the vivid and fresh interest of 
men to the last times. 

It is a pleasant thought, that the very names 
which we revere in the biblical biographies will 
seem to the last generations of the race to be the 
only immortal names in history. The very stories 
which we teach to our children from these inspired 
pages will fascinate the children and the children's 
children of the world's closing ages. Abel, Abra- 
ham, Joseph, David. Isaiah, Daniel, John the Bap- 
tist, St. Paul, the Virgin Mary, will live in the 
reverence of the remotest times, when not a guess 
at their existence could survive the ravages of 
time but for the place they hold in the execution 
of God's work and in the record of it in God's 
word. 

The eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the 
Hebrews will immortalize certain names, which 



THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE. 241 

now are not known to half the world. That poor 
woman who broke the box of alabaster on the per- 
son of her Lord is to have a memorial of that act 
preserved for her among all nations and through 
all time. She will be the subject of study to 
Christian scholars when the Pyramids of Egypt 
shall have crumbled. What will the world care 
then for Cheops in comparison with this nameless 
woman ? Her deed of love to Christ will give her 
a name above all the honors of heraldry. It is an 
affecting comment on the destiny of all things hu- 
man, that the only thing which is to hand down 
the name of the first man of our race to the last 
man is that plan of God in the structure of the 
Bible which has wrought the name of Adam into 
the story of redemption. 

A single reflection is suggested by this review. 
It is the glory of the Christian Church. Who can 
help exulting in it ? In this Church of the living 
God is concentrated all that is eternal in this 
world's history. It is identified with God, and 
God is identified with it. Its work is God's work. 
Already its history laps over into another world. 
It has sent forward its advance-guard in innumer- 
able hosts who are waiting for the rear-guard. 
But a little stream divides them. That stream it- 
self is populous with the multitudes who are cross- 
ing over. 

" Just before, the shining shore 
We may almost discover." 



242 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

It is a privilege — is it not ? — to be a member 
of the Church of Christ ; to constitute one of 
this mighty and immortal host ; to bear the name 
which it bears ; to unite in its songs, and be re- 
membered in its prayers ; to be identified with its 
work, and to share its rewards ; to be counted 
worthy of its sufferings, and to earn the fruit of 
its heroism : what has life to offer to a good man 
of lofty aspirations which can bear comparison 
with this ? I never think of a child of God out- 
side of the Church of Christ, but with feelings of 
unutterable compassion. He is -losing so much 
which might be his; he is failing to achieve so 
much which might swell his reward at the Mas- 
ter's coming ! 

He reminds me of the story of " The Man with- 
out a Country," doomed, in punishment of his mo- 
mentary treason, never to hear from human lips 
the name of the land that gave him birth. He 
crossed oceans in his country's service, but could 
never hear her glory told. Her insignia were torn 
from the badge of his uniform. When his com- 
panions exulted over the news of her victories, 
dead silence stopped all voices if he entered their 
circle. The newspaper from home was not per- 
mitted to pass into his hands till it had been re- 
viewed by a censor, and the name of his country 
expurgated from its columns. Though an honest 
sailor and a gallant officer, his name appeared no- 
where on the roll of his country's fame. He lived 



THE KINGDOMS THAT DIE. 243 

and died a nameless man, without a country and 
without a home. 

Such a one does a Christian seem, who is trying 
to serve God and make his way to heaven outside 
of and out of sympathy with the Church of Christ. 
What can be done with such a man in heaven ? 
What regrets must mingle with his joys on enter- 
ing there ! " Do this in remembrance of me." 
That one command, given in the parting hour by 
the loving Saviour to loved disciples, he has never 
in his whole life obeyed. 

Oh, thanks to God for his visible Church ! for 
her hymns and her prayers, for her ordinances and 
the promises she inherits, for the fellowship of the 
saints on earth with saints in heaven, for the 
history of her sufferings, and the future of her 
triumphs ! Thank God for her immortality ! 
While every thing else in this world must die and 
rot, there is one thing that lives, one thing over 
which death has no power, one thing that smiles 
at the grave as it passes on to a life that has no 
end! 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 

Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his 
lords, and drank wine before the thousand. ... In the same hour 
came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the 
candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and 
the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's 
countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that 
the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one 
against another. . . . And this is the writing that was written : 
Mene, Mene, Tekel, Uphaksin. This is the interpretation of 
the thing: Mene; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished 
it. Tekel; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found 
wanting. Peres; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the 
Medes and Persians. ... In that night was Belshazzar the king 
of the Chaldseans slain. —Dan. v. 1, 5, 6, 25-28, 30. 

WASHINGTON ALLSTON spent more 
than twelve years attempting to paint the 
scene of Belshazzar's feast, and then left his work 
unfinished. It is said that the chief difficulty, 
which the artist's genius could not overcome, was 
that of depicting the despair of the doomed king. 
Well it might be so ; for it was the despair of a 
lost soul brought suddenly face to face with the 
retributive judgment of God, written by a mys- 
terious hand from another world. What art can 
portray it in the look of a human face ? 

This Chaldsean monarch is one of the few indi- 

244 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 245 

vidual cases mentioned in the Scriptures, of men 
whose damnation in eternity is made morally cer- 
tain. Rarely, even in the case of a very wicked 
man, does the inspired writer lift the veil from 
individual destiny, and assure us that it is fatal. 
But in this instance there can scarcely be room 
for doubt. The implications of doom are over- 
whelming. Belshazzar had been long familiar 
with a knowledge of the true God. He had had 
miraculous evidences of it in the experience of 
his father. " Thou knewest all this," is the faith- 
ful reminder which the prophet gives him. Yet 
he had persisted in a life and reign of extreme 
and unblushing guilt. " O Belshazzar, thou hast 
not humbled thine heart ; but hast lifted up thy- 
self against the Lord of heaven." Then appeared 
the fearful writing on the wall, the purport of 
which is too plain to admit of doubt. That night 
the king was summoned to the bar of God. 

This may be fairly assumed, therefore, as a case 
of clear and prolonged conviction of sin which did 
not result in the soul's salvation. Who of us has 
the heart to follow the doomed monarch beyond 
the scenes of that awful night ? Let us draw the 
veil over that unwritten and unutterable future, 
and turn to a class of men whose experience on 
the subject of religion is not dissimilar, so far as 
this, — that they have long known the truth, have 
long felt themselves to be sinners before God, yet 
they stop just there, with the acknowledged sense 



246 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

of sin often lying as a wearisome weight on their 
souls, and never relieved Jby repentance and the 
consciousness of peace with God. If they were 
to be suddenly called into God's presence with 
hearts unchanged, as the Chaldsean king was, the 
verdict of the mysterious hand would be the 
same : " Thou art weighed in the balances, and 
art found wanting." 

One young man I once knew, in whose mind 
these very words rested for months, as the sum- 
ming up of his own character and destiny. 
"Weighed, and found wanting," — the words were 
like a live coal upon his eyeballs. Wherever he 
looked he saw them. They glared upon him from 
the walls of his chamber. All faith, all hope, was 
buried in them. Outwardly he lived like other 
men. Few knew the dull nightmare of conscious 
and despairing guilt in which he lived. Yet rare- 
ly was he conscious of an hour when he did not 
feel it, resting like a pall over the joys of this 
world, and foreshadowing in silent prophecy his 
doom in another. He represented a class of men 
who are not few, who suffer for years under hope- 
less and fruitless convictions of sin. 

There are certain truths which one who is living 
in the state of mind here described needs espe- 
cially to consider. 

1. One is that the suffering which accompanies 
hopeless conviction of sin is no more than a sinner 
Hopeless consciousness of sin is re- 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 247 

morse ; and remorse is the natural vengeance of 
sin upon a sinner. It is legitimate : it is just. 
We are never wronged in the vengeance of re- 
morse. God has not wronged us in making us 
susceptible of such suffering ; conscience does not 
wrong us in inflicting it ; the holy universe does 
not wrong us in approving it. 

We have no reason to compassionate ourselves 
as if we were only unfortunates in the gloom of 
hopeless guilt. That is an enervating state of 
mind in which a convicted sinner pities himself 
because he feels that he is a sufferer. Conviction 
must probe our souls deeper than that. We must_ 
condemn ourselves, and justify God, even if he 
should leave us in that furnace of burning re- 
morse through eternity. Never a man of us will 
truly accept Christ as a Saviour, who does not so 
feel his own guilt as to drop the sense of injury, 
and justify God in his condemnation. "Eternal 
sin deserves eternal woe," — until we feel this in 
our inmost being, we have no adequate sense of 
what sin is, — no adequate sense, therefore, of our 
need of Christ ; and we accept Christ never but 
as a necessity. 

One man lived in such an overwhelming con- 
sciousness of ill-desert, that, when death ap- 
proached, he wrote to a friend, " Let me beg of 
you, as you value your old friend, not to suffer 
any pomp to be used at my funeral, nor any mon- 
umental inscription to mark where I am laid. 



248 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Lay me quietly in the earth : place a sun-dial over 
my grave, and let me be forgotten." Yet that 
man was John Howard. The best of men feel 
most profoundly the conviction of ill-desert as a 
part of the conviction of sin. Until a sinner feels 
this, he cannot feel that Christ is a necessity to 
him ; and there is no peace for him. 

2. Yet one who suffers under unavailing convic- 
tions should see that it is no proper effect of religion 
to produce such convictions. On no subject do we 
confound causes and effects more egregiously than 
on this. We charge upon religion the misery 
which arises from the want of it. The legitimate 
tendency of piety in the soul is all benignant. 
The fruit of the Spirit — what is it? Love, joy, 
peace. Glad tidings of great joy, this is the gos- 
pel. It is a volume of benedictions. 

Elementary truths are these ; yet the sense of 
guilt often crowds them out of sight. A sinner 
feels the throes of remorse, and says within him- 
self, "This is the fruit of religion." His former 
gayety he contrasts with his present misery ; and 
he reflects, " This is what religion does for a man." 
The world looks upon the change in him, and 
says, "See the working of your religion : it is a 
sour-faced business ! " Not so, not so. There is 
no religion in suffering as such. There is no reli- 
gion in fear, in conviction of guilt, in self-reproach, 
in forebodings of hell. A prolonged endurance 
of these is no necessary preliminary to the peace 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 249 

of a forgiven soul. Some converted men have 
never experienced them in protracted or despair- 
ing agony. 

Says Dr. Chalmers, " I cannot say of myself 
that I ever felt a state of mind corresponding to 
John Bnnyan's 'Slough of Despond.' What am 
I to infer from this? That I have not yet sur- 
mounted the impassable barrier that stands be- 
tween me and the gate of life? So one would 
suppose from John Bunyan. So I would sup- 
pose, myself, were it not for the assurance of the 
Saviour, ' He that believeth in me, though he were 
dead yet shall he live.' This is my firm hold, and 
I will not let it go." 

No, there are no grooves in which the experi- 
ence anterior to the joy of pardon must run long 
and gloomily, as through an unlighted tunnel. 
The tumultuous conflicts which some endure, at 
a certain crisis of their religious history, are the 
conflicts of sin, — not with sin, but of sin. They 
are the sheer obstinacy of guilt resisting its own 
condemnation by the just mind of God. They 
are the death-struggle of sin, prolonged only so 
long as the sinner withholds himself from Christ. 
In the rapids of a cataract, the bare struggle to 
stand still may strain the muscles to agony. So, 
in the midst of convictions of guilt, and the striv- 
ings of the Holy Spirit, a sinner's sheer effort to 
remain a sinner may wrench all joy out of him. 

3. A third truth which should command the 



250 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

faith of one who endures ineffectual convictions 
of sin is, that God is a sinner's friend. It seems 
irreverent to affirm this, as if a doubt of it were 
conceivable. Yet towards no other one truth is 
the human heart so faithless. The instinct of sin 
is to look upon God as not only the enemy of sin, 
but the enemy of the sinner as well. 

Under Christian light, right here beneath the 
meridian of Christian illumination, men do not 
know God as their friend. "May I love God ? " 
was the trembling and faithless query of one peni- 
tent believer. When sin dawns upon the sinner's 
conscience as a reality, it starts up the thought of 
God as an enemy. We are apt to count that man 
our enemy to whom we are enemies. Nature says, 
" He will injure me, whom I have injured." Sin is 
twin brother to Hate. 

Said an injured man at the capital of our coun- 
try, justifying himself for taking the life of his 
enemy, "He wronged me in that one thing in 
which no man ever forgives his fellow. He and I 
cannot live on the same globe together." So it is 
human nature to reason about God. " He is my 
enemy because I am his." The world seems to be 
losing its youth, and growing old before its time, 
in the struggle of the ages to rid itself of this 
satanic conception of God. That there is one 
Being in the universe, who, with no taint in his 
ineffable purity, can look down upon this world 
with mild, pitying, forgiving eyes, — this one 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 251 

thought of God in Christ is the conception of 
him against which guilt has been contending for 
six thousand years. 

One who suffers under prolonged and abortive 
convictions of sin should therefore admit this faith 
to his heart, — that God is a sinner's friend. Not 
merely that Christ is his friend. A strange and 
murky distortion sometimes gets possession of us. 
It is that somehow God and Christ are not at one 
in friendliness to the guilty. The idea does not 
define itself sharply. If it did, a man's good 
sense would reject it. But, if defined, it would 
be something like this, — that, while Christ desires 
to save men, back of his atoning work there stands 
a frowning and relentless Deity, who is averse to 
the whole procedure by which a sinner escapes 
eternal woe. God, as such, is eager to damn a 
sinner. The necessities of his holy nature are 
such that he enjoys the outpouring of his wrath 
in eternal fires. God, as such, therefore, is the 
sinner's enemy. In the blackness of darkness 
which, overwhelms a despairing soul, these two 
conceptions of God as love, and God as a con- 
suming fire, often wrestle like masked com- 
batants. 

In the final extreme, there comes about that 
state of guilty conviction without hope which 
one of the most earnest thinkers of England 
described by saying, "Life, the world, mankind, 
religion, eternity, all appear to me like one vast 



252 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

scene of confusion, stretching away before me, and 
closed in shades of the most dreadful darkness, — 
a darkness which only the most powerful splendors 
of Deity can illumine, and which appears as if 
they never had illumined it." 

I have somewhere read a story of a man who 
was locked into a darkened chamber at midnight 
and alone, with a maniac in a paroxysm of silent 
and cunning bloodthirst. Crouching in one corner, 
the horror-struck man could hear the creaking of 
the floor under the cat-like tread of the demoniac 
as he crept after him. He moved noiselessly to 
another corner ; but soon he felt the magnetic 
sense of the proximity of the foe he could not see 
and dared not touch. Springing past him in the 
darkness, he could perceive the taint of his hot 
breath, and could hear his quick panting, and 
the grinding of his teeth in disappointed rage. 
Moments were ages in the waiting for the death- 
grapple. When the morning dawned, and relief 
came, and the windows were thrown open, his 
raven hair was turned snow-white. 

To such insane companionship does hopeless 
guilt doom a man at the last in the communings 
of his soul with God. With trembling reverence 
be it said, if God were an Almighty Maniac he 
could scarcely be an object of more profound 
terror or more relentless hate. This is no fiction. 
Some heathen tribes have worshipped just such a 
god. It is a frightful confirmation of the biblical 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 253 

conception of sin, that when the human mind 
loses all knowledge of the true God, the Devil 
takes his place. And not the Devil in lofty and 
aspiring malignity like that of Milton's Satan, but 
in grovelling or insane distortions which the soul 
shudders at, yet yields to. " Fall down and wor- 
ship me," is the dread command; and it is obeyed. 
Demoniac idols in heathen temples bear a frightful 
resemblance to the faces of maniacs. 

Now, so long as such a nightmare of horror as 
this broods over a man, think you that he can 
have peace ? 

The power which conquers guilt is the omnipo- 
tence of love. Let it be repeated and reiterated 
therefore, — God is the sinner's friend. Throw 
open the windows to the light of heaven. Let 
the glory of God stream in from golden skies ! 
The whole Godhead is the sinner's friend. " I will 
rejoice to do them good with my whole heart and 
with my whole soul." There is no Nemesis crouch- 
ing with malign cunning behind the cross. God 
is never more the sinner's friend than in the very 
quickening of conscience which he resists. 

It has been said, that, in such a world as this, " a 
man may have too much love to weep." So in the 
appalling extremity to which sin has reduced man- 
kind, God has too much love to beguile them with 
a maudlin kindness which would not pain them 
by a disclosure of their guilt to their own souls. 
God is intent on their salvation, not so much from 



254 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

suffering as from sin. Sin is the maelstrom which 
sucks into its vortex all joy, all peace, all hope. 
God strains the resources of his wisdom and his 
power to rescue men from eternal guilt. He con- 
descends to enter into conflict with them to save 
them from themselves. Such is his faithful, his 
enduring, his long-suffering, his overwhelming 
friendship. His indeed is love which many 
waters cannot quench, nor floods drown. George 
Fox describes his own discovery of this truth, in 
language which portrays the experience of all who 
are enlightened by the grace of God. He says, 
" I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and 
death. But an infinite ocean of light and love 
flowed over the ocean of darkness ; and in that I 
saw the infinite love of God." 

At some point in our mental history, if we are 
ever to be saved, we must let into our souls that 
mighty and swelling flood of benignity which God 
has poured forth in this work for our deliverance 
from guilt, and in which the whole heart of the 
Godhead has been expressed. Said one, reflecting 
upon the disclosures of God in nature, " Flowers 
surely are smiles of God's goodness." — "Yes," 
said his friend with a deeper insight, "yes; but 
the fairest flower I ever saw climbing around a 
poor man's window was never so beautiful in my 
eyes as the Bible which I saw lying within." So 
should we look at the goodness of God, as it is 
seen in the revelation of the brightness of the 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 255 

Father's glory. Nowhere else do we feel as we 
do here, that God is a sinner's friend. 

4. Again, one who labors under fruitless con- 
victions needs to see that the chief obstacle to his 
salvation is not the want of a more perfect under- 
standing of the theory of conversion. This suggests 
a peculiar delusion under which men often suffer, 
when convinced of sin without repentance. We 
are apt to fancy, in such a state, that we should 
be saved more easily if we understood the process 
more philosophically. Our work would be more 
practicable if we could see into God's work more 
cunningly. 

If we could lift the curtain that hides the de- 
crees, of God ; if we could discover how prayer can 
affect the decree concerning our salvation, which 
was fixed before we had souls to save ; if we could 
solve the riddle of impenitent prayer ; if we could 
satisfy reason as to the responsibility of a sinner 
whose heart God has hardened in some sense, as 
he did Pharaoh's ; in brief, if the tangled knot of 
the divine and the human in one, which is laced 
most inseparably in the doctrine of conversion, 
could be untwisted, and its filaments straightened 
out side by side, — we cannot resist the feeling 
that we should breathe more freely, and look 
heavenward more hopefully. 

The point I would emphasize, therefore, is that 
the chief obstruction to a man's salvation never 
lies in any such difficulty as that. A sinner needs 



256 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

to admit this and to feel it. It may be that even 
a legitimate interest in the theory of religion — 
that is, an interest right enough in itself, and at 
some time and for some minds important — is not 
timely to your mind now and here. Some minds 
need, for their healthy and practical working in 
religious matters, a reduction of speculative tone. 
Religious speculation often reaches a condition 
like that which medical science calls "sub-acute 
inflammation." It needs to be reduced to less 
feverish inquiry. 

The Rev. John Foster of Bristol was probably 
by nature one of the most sceptical men who have 
ever been led to accept Christ as a Saviour, It 
was a long stride towards the salvation of such a 
soul as his when he was led to say, as he did at 
last, after long despair, " I have felt the neces- 
sity of dismissing subtle speculations, and of yield- 
ing a humble, cordial assent to mysterious truth, 
just as and because the Scriptures declare it, with- 
out asking, 'How can these things be?' The 
gospel is to me a matter of urgent necessity. I 
come to Jesus because I need pardon." So must 
every sinner come, — not beguiled by the solution 
of difficulties, but driven by a sense of necessities. 
The vast majority of us never come in any other 
way. 

5. The chief obstacle to the termination of fruit- 
less convictions in peace with God is to be found 
in some plain, practical affair of character and real 



FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 257 

life. No feeling, I think, is more common among 
those who have found peace in Christ, after pro- 
tracted and remorseful conflict, than the feeling 
of surprise that they have been kept aloof from 
Christ so long. They have been looking up into 
the clouds, struggling with aching eyes to see 
visions ; or have introverted their thoughts upon 
themselves, straining to see their own eyeballs : 
wliile the real obstacle to their conversion has 
been in plain sight at their feet, — a little thing 
perhaps ; a trifling thing, as they now regard it ; 
in comparison with Christ, a contemptible thing. 
They are humiliated at the discovery that so mean 
a thing has had power to hold them back from the 
wide-open gates of heaven. It seems to them, in 
the retrospect, like some invisible and malignant 
magic in the air. 

I have seen a diseased man fascinated by a piece 
of magnetized iron not so large as my hand. He 
would gaze upon it as if, like a serpent, it had 
charmed him. He would follow it from room to 
room, in agony lest it should pass out of his sight. 
He would chase it in the street, and lie down and 
grovel in the dust where it was thrown. He 
seemed as if his spirit had in part passed out of 
him, and had entered that magnet. 

Thus demented do converted men sometimes 
seem to themselves to have been, when they look 
back over the unseen line which separates them 
from their impenitent life, and see what a paltry 






258 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

thing it was which held them so long transfixed in 
those fruitless convictions, while a crucified Sa- 
viour was pleading with them and dying for them, 
within reach of their hand. Such has been the 
experience of thousands, and doubtless will be of 
thousands more. 

The charms by which the sorcery of sin thus 
bewitches men are very numerous, and diverse in 
character. In one man it is a distrust of God's 
willingness to save, or, if to save, to save him. In 
another, it is an unwillingness to own the simpli- 
city of God's methods of salvation. In another it 
is a desire for a gorgeous experience, like that of 
exceptional Christian memoirs. In the vast ma- 
jority, however, it is not in any conceptions cher- 
ished about the way of salvation, but in something 
altogether more tangible and earthly. The whole 
truth is, that the man loves something more than 
God. In one it is his property; in another, his 
reputation ; in another, his ease ; in another, his 
literary tastes ; in another, an unchristian employ- 
ment or habit or association, which he feels to 
be a-t war with an earnest Christian life. He fore- 
sees, that, if he becomes a Christian, that must be 
given up. In some it is an unwillingness publicly 
to profess religion, to perform certain public or 
social religious duties, to encounter the ridicule of 
companions, or to forgive an injury which rankles 
in the heart. 

Some such verv simple thing is the citadel in 






FRUITLESS CONVICTIONS OF SIN. 259 

which the forces of guilty resolve intrench them- 
selves. That is the secret reason why the soul is 
benighted in impotent convictions. Yet what a 
meanness of spirit does it seem to have indicated 
when the soul comes out into the liberty of Christ, 
to have shnt itself up in that prison-house of 
remorse so long, and for such a thing ! 

I have somewhere read of an obscure Scotch 
woman whom Dr. Chalmers, as the story ran, was 
once summoned at midnight to attend in her last 
hours. She had lived for many years in sterile 
conviction of her sinfulness. Her anguish at last 
threatened her reason. " Weighed in the balances, 
and found wanting ! " This was the burden she 
was carrying into eternity. With that kindly 
sympathy and tact for which Chalmers was noted 
in his ministrations to the ignorant, he sat down 
by her side, heard the story of her life, now and 
then aiding her to state her own case, for he knew 
it better than she did ; and at length, when she 
had been calmed by the expression of her burden, 
he pointed out to her the one simple thing which 
he conjectured to have been the thing that had 
withheld her from Christ. The profoundest doc- 
trine of our theology he told her as a simple story 
in her own Lowland dialect, and then told her, in 
the same rude speech of her childhood, that she 
must give up that thing for Christ's sake. The 
heavy-laden one, who had borne her infirmity for 
many years, and could in no wise lift up herself. 



260 



STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



looked up and said, but half believing, "And is 
that a' ? " It was as if the Lord himself had laid 
his hand upon her. Immediately she was made 
straight, and glorified God. 

So, many a penitent belie Yer at the last recalls 
his bondage in sin, and exclaims, " Is that all that 
kept me so long away from Christ ? " 



THE MEN IN THE FIRE. 

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered and said to the 
king, O Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer thee in 
this matter. If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver 
us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of 
thy hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, 
that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image 
which thou hast set up. — Dan. iii. 16-18. 

FEW men have the fortitude to bear the appli- 
cation of the moxa. When Senator Sumner 
was once inquired of, whether he found it intoler- 
able, he evaded the query, saying, " Well, fire is 
fire. I believe the world has no two opinions 
about that." When St. Paul would express the 
severity of the trial of the eternal judgment, to 
which every man's work in life is to be subjected, 
he terms it " the trial as by fire." 

Yes, fire is fire. Men in a furnace at white heat 
are not blamable, as the world judges, if they 
fling religious scruples to the winds. If wise men 
grow mad, if calm men become furious, if honest 
men are false, if devout men swear, the world 
finds no heart to rebuke them"; for are they not 
men in the fire ? 

Not so thought and reasoned and acted the 

261 



262 



STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



three youthful victims of Chaldsean vengeance. 
They stand at the head of the long line of mar- 
tyrs by fire in Christian history. Thousands in 
later times, some even younger than they, have 
walked calmly to the stake, cheered by the words 
of these young Hebrew exiles. Their great ser- 
vice to the world of subsequent ages is their 
teaching by word and act the nature and the work- 
ing of a religion of principle. 

1. They illustrate the truth that a religion of 
principle is founded on intelligent convictions of 
truth, so fixed in the heart as to be beyond the reach 
of argument. Their answer to the king's com- 
mand has been the watchword of martyrs from 
that day to this : " We are not careful to answer 
thee in this matter. . . . But be it known unto 
thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods." 

There is a state of religious experience, possible 
to every Christian, of which this is a sample. It 
is a state in which the believer no longer needs 
argument to support his convictions, and is no 
longer -open to argument against them. Certain 
central truths of religion are fixed in his very 
soul.. They have been settled once for all and 
forever. An oak of a hundred years' growth is 
not rooted so immovably. They are thus settled, 
because they have become matters Of experience. 
They long ago passed out of the realm of theory 
into the realm which Whitefield called " soul-life." 
The believer no longer believes : he knows. His 



THE MEN IN THE FIRE. 263 

faith has become his life. It has passed into the 
same rank of truths as that of gravitation. It 
gives to the whole religious being of the man a 
certain planetary fixedness and serenity, like those 
of Orion and the Pleiades. Canst thou loose the 
bands of Orion ? 

On such foundations a religion of principle is 
built. When infidelity assails it, when ridicule 
scoffs at it, when science disproves it, when au- 
thority forbids it, when fire and sword and gibbet 
would crush it, its calm reply is, "We are not 
careful to answer thee, but we will not." In 
these very words the father of the Wesleys sent 
back his answer to an iniquitous order from James 
II. of England. 

When Philip II. of Spain sent ' " Alva the 
Butcher " on his crusade against the people of the 
Netherlands, thousands of men, women, and chil- 
dren sent back from the scaffold and the stake 
these words of calm defiance : " We are not care- 
ful to answer, but be it known that we will not 
obey." Children from ten to fifteen years of age 
used to imitate in solemn sport the scene of the 
auto-da-fe, in token of their resolve to die in the 
faith of their fathers. And when the sport be- 
came grim reality, and their tender limbs shrivelled 
and crackled in the flames, they did not flinch. 
That was the religion of principle, uttering itself 
from the depths of a " soul-life," which had out- 
lived the need of argument to support it, and the 
power of argument to change it. 



264 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

What could those children know of the argu- 
ment for Christian truth, which ages of debate 
and of august councils had elaborated ? They 
neither knew, nor cared to know. They had re- 
ceived from God a profounder teaching. Theirs 
was an experience of truth in the soul's life. 
They knew it because they had lived it. They 
could as easily have been argued out of their faith 
in the sunrise, as out of their faith in Christ. 
Just tnat kind of evidence and that degree of 
conviction are the privilege oi every child of God. 

2. The religion of principle consists pre-emi- 
nently in obedience to the sense of duty, without re- 
gard to consequences. So far as it appears from the 
story of these " men in the fire," this was their 
reasoning, and the whole of it : " We have only 
to do right, in the fear of God." Not a word is 
uttered from which we can infer that they think 
for one moment of what is or is not expedient. 
They are in a strait in which they may well be 
pardoned if they do ask themselves : " Can we 
not somehow save our lives ? " Not a word of 
that sort appears, except a sublime assurance that 
God will save them, but a more sublime purpose to 
obey him whether he will or not. No nice points 
occur to them to be settled ; no possible evasions ; 
no concealment of their convictions; no hiding of 
their purposes. 

Volumes have been written by wise men on 
questions relating to possible escape from martyr- 



THE MEN IN THE FIRE. 265 

dom by crafty victims. " May a man lie to save 
his life from the flames ? Has an enemy to God 
a right to know the truth from one to whom a 
disclosure of the truth is death ? How much of 
one's faith may one hold in secret, under threat 
of axe and gibbet ? For wife and children may not 
a man lie, when he would not to save his own 
life ? " Said one, " I will not tell one falsehood to 
save my life, but I will tell ten to save my boy." 
Not a hint of any such Jesuitical strategy do these 
victims of pagan ferocity give us. There is a 
magnificent fling of self-abandonment in their sole 
resolve and its bold avowal, " Be it known that we 
will not." Moreover, the grandeur of the whole 
procedure is that their conscience is so eagle-eyed 
as to see the right on the spur of the moment. 
They are not startled into a momentary equivoca- 
tion. When good men deny Christ, they are com- 
monly surprised into it. Not so these three cap- 
tives of the fire. They might be the three " wise 
men of the East," for their self-collected and clear- 
headed discernment of the right. With the hell 
of the furnace in the one scale, and beautiful 
young life in the other, there is not an instant of 
doubt which shall kick the beam. Said a Roman 
general, when urged to save his life at the cost of 
his honor, " It is necessary that my honor should 
live: it is not necessary that I should." So say 
these gentle youth, as they look into the mouth of 
that white furnace : "It is necessary that we be 
true to God : it is not necessary that we live." 



266 



STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



Always is it characteristic of a religion of prin- 
ciple, that it gives small place to questions of ex- 
pediency, except where the right depends on the 
expedient. The strength of godly principle is 
proportioned to its godly simplicity. It works 
with a noble independence of complicated motives 
and the intricacies of diplomacy. It never under- 
mines a duty by questions of casuistry. Twists 
and doublings of conscience are not to its taste. 
Straight on it moves, to life if it may, to death 
if it must. This gives to such a type of religious 
character a marvellous power when confronted 
with this world of stratagem and duplicity. 

The old mythology tells a story of a labyrinth 
of three thousand chambers, so contrived that no 
man had ever come out of it alive. The victim 
doomed to explore its dark recesses wandered on 
in hopeless mazes, turning this way and that, 
doubling on his track, confused by his own foot- 
steps, dismayed by the sound of the bones of pre- 
vious victims as he trampled on them, till at last, 
worn out with weariness and hunger and thirst 
and fright, he laid himself down, friendless and 
alone, to die. At length one prisoner bethought 
himself of the simple expedient of a ball of silk, 
the filament of which was scarcely visible to the 
eye. One end of it he fastened at the entrance, 
and then unrolled it as he advanced. Thus he 
explored the cave of doom, from whence no mor- 
tal had returned to the light of day before. 



THE MEN IN THE FIRE. 267 

When he had reached its remotest chambers he 
had only to wind np again the silken thread, and 
follow it back to light and life. Snch a filament 
of silken simplicity is duty, to one who is sent 
into the intricacies and snares of this world on 
probation for eternity. 

3. The religion of principle carries with it a pro- 
found sense of a personal God. " Our God whom 
we serve." This is the first and last and ruling 
thought of these youthful heroes. Duty is no 
abstraction to them. They are not philosophers. 
They are simply believers in a living God. Poor 
souls ! they know no better. They have never 
heard of the "Over-Soul" and the "Soul of the 
world." They have not been taught the dignity 
of their descent from baboons, by the force of 
" natural selection." Advanced thinkers have not 
instructed them in the religion of "protoplasm." 
But they do the best they know, humbly hoping 
that things will not go hard with them for trust- 
ing in a personal God. They enter into no discus- 
sion of the Hebrew as compared with the Chal- 
dsean ethics. God, the living God, is the beginning 
and the end of the whole business. 

A singular type of religious belief — or nega- 
tion, call it which you please — has sprung up in 
our day, perhaps for the first time in the world's 
history. It proposes to build a system of Chris- 
tian ethics on the intuitions of conscience alone, 
denying the authority of Christ and the being of 



268 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

a God. " Do right," is its moral law. " Obey 
conscience." " Care not for Jesus of Nazareth : 
lie was a man like the rest of us. As for God, 
have no fear of him: he is a bugaboo of dark 
ages." 

Never was a more unnatural monstrosity manu- 
factured as the basis of a practical religion for 
men in their right minds. The Tartar who made 
his windmill do his praying for him, and the 
Frenchman who politely left his card on the 
cathedral altar, had not a more ignoble notion of 
religion. A healthy mind recoils from it as an 
absurdity. 

To such a mind, duty and God are correlative 
ideas. Each is inseparable from the other. The 
force of each corresponds to the force of the other 
in the faith of the believer. Talk to a man of 
duty, and his instinctive query is, "Duty to 
whom?" Tell a man that he ought, and he re- 
joins, " Ought? why ? " " Ought " implies obliga- 
tion : obligation to whom ? The very structure 
of the language mirrors a person. It means that 
or nothing. This mysterious indweller which we 
call " conscience," and which is the still guest of 
every man, is simply God writing his will on the 
walls of the soul's inner chambers. It is impera- 
tive as God is, pure as God is, deathless as God 
is. To hold to conscience, and deny God, is to 
grasp the shadow, and reject the substance. 

The New England Pilgrims have been lauded 



THE MEIT IN THE FIRE. 269 

for the strength of their religious principle in not 
landing on the coast of Plymouth on the Lord's 
Day. Sixty-six days they had spent in a ship of 
but a hundred and eighty tons' burden. Some 
were prostrate with disease. The ship had sprung 
a leak. It -would have been a great comfort to 
them to have set foot once more on solid land. 
But the day was holy time. They would not do 
violence to their consciences by needless labor. 
They waited in the close and comfortless cabin till 
the sabbath's sun went down. The world has 
rung with their praises from that day to this, for 
that act of sacrifice to a principle of conscience. 

But how did those devotees of conscience spend 
those hours of holy time ? Did they engage in 
mystic converse on the dignity of man, the su- 
premacy of conscience, the godhead of self? Did 
they commune with each other upon the sublimity 
of law without a lawgiver ; of conscience without a 
God; of Christianity without a Christ? Did they 
amuse themselves with any such religious cat's- 
cradle, experimenting to see how many senseless 
and useless curiosities in ethics they could make 
out of it ? Not they. They lifted up their voices 
over that frozen coast in songs of praise and prayer 
to the living One. I seem to hear them singing, 
in commemoration of their deliverance from the 
perils of the sea, the old quaint version, by Stern- 
hold and Hopkins, of the eighteenth Psalm : — 






270 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

" The Lord descended from above, 
And bowed the heavens hie ; 
And underneath his feete he cast 
The darknesse of the skie. 

On cherubs and on cherubins 

Full royallie he rode ; 
And on the winges of all the windes, 

Came flying alle abroad. 

And from above the Lord sent downe, 

To fetch me from belowe ; 
And pluckt me out of waters great, 

That would me overflow. 

He brought me foorth in open place, 

Whereas I might be free ; 
And kept me safe because he had 

A favour unto mee." 

To them right living was living to God. Con- 
science was but the echo of God's voice. The 
right was but the record of God's will. A per- 
sonal and living Being, a faithful and present 
Friend, was the power which made conscience, 
the right, duty, all that they were to those Chris- 
tian heroes. So it will always be with men in 
whom religion assumes the solidity of a principle. 
Only as God energizes it, can religion take on a 
form so grand and so abiding. 

4. The religion of principle is the only type of 
religious character which commands the confidence of 
the world. Who would have predicted that three 



THE MEN IN THE FIEE. 271 

young men, but a little above the age and rank 
of boys, waifs from a foreign land and a subject 
people, exposed at any moment to the penalty of 
death, should win over to a new and despised 
religion the respect of the haughtiest monarch of 
the East ? Yet this was the fruit of their daring 
defiance of his commands. His outraged pride 
was awed by their fidelity to a principle. " Blessed 
be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego ! 
There is no God that can deliver after this sort. 
His servants have yielded their bodies, that they 
might not worship any god but their own God." 
Such is the outburst of astonished conviction from 
the awe-struck king. 

Always and everywhere men fall back and give 
place to those who practise a religion which costs 
them something. Other sorts of religion there are 
which serve their turn in idle hours and times of 
ease. There is a religion of form, whose pagean- 
tries please the eye, and which does well enough 
for a religion of state on festive days. There is a 
religion of taste, in which music and architecture, 
and the poetry of a painted window, may charm 
the fancy of culture and refinement, when no 
great stress of real life is upon them. There is a 
religion of feeling, which may uplift great assem- 
blies on great occasions, and bear them on waves 
of religiosity which to certain temperaments may 
seem for the time to mount up to the gates of 
heaven. 



272 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

These reflections and refractions of religion in 
times of prosperity, when no emergency tries the 
souls of men, may do very well for their religious 
entertainment, and the quieting of religious fears. 
But when the tug of real life comes, when tempta- 
tion, bereavement, disappointment, disease, death, 
bring men's religion to the proof, these religious 
fictions vanish in thin' air. No religious plaything 
answers the purpose then. Men feel then the 
need of something real, something solid, something 
profound, something godlike. 

Similar is the power of a religion of principle, 
when viewed as a spectacle by reverent observers. 
Nothing else rouses the enthusiasm of lookers-on, 
and brings out their huzzas to the echo, like a 
grand spectacle of self-sacrifice to a religious prin- 
ciple on a grand scale. 

In 1843 the Free Church of Scotland left the 
shelter of the State Establishment. Four hundred 
and seventy-five clergymen gave up their stipends, 
the principal of which amounted to two millions 
of pounds sterling. They abandoned the dignity 
of association with a great empire. They left be- 
hind them the parishes in which they and their 
fathers had labored, the churches in which they 
were baptized, the Lord's table at which they had 
ministered, the manses where their children had 
been born and in which they had hoped to die. 
From almost all that was dear to them on earth, 
they went out, and cast themselves on their fidelity 



THE MEN IN THE FIRE. 273 

to each other and the promises of God. Some of 
them had to worship on the sea-beach at low tide, 
because the noble landlords would not sell or lease 
a foot of land for a dissenting chapel. All this 
for one principle of religious faith, which in con- 
science they could not surrender, and would not 
dishonor. 

Among their ablest opponents was the Hon. 
Judge Jeffrey, an ornament to the judiciary of Scot- 
land, and one of the shining lights of her literature. 
He had spoken against them, argued against them, 
written against them, ridiculed their scruples to the 
last, and had predicted, that, to a man, they would 
yield if the trial came. The trial did come, and 
they did not yield. The ejected pastors quietly 
laid their protest before Lord Bute, who was pres- 
ent in the General Assembly as the representative 
of the Crown ; then turned, and in solemn silence 
left the reverend judicature in which some of them 
had sat as leaders for many years, but whose dig- 
nities they were to enjoy no more. 

As they filed out of the house, and marched 
down the High Street of Edinburgh, with the ven- 
erable Chalmers — the foremost man of all Scot- 
land — at their head, Judge Jeffrey was told by 
a friend, who came rushing in to inform him. 
" They are out ! They are out ! " — " Who are 
out ? " — " The evangelicals. There they go down 
High Street. Don't you hear the cheers of the 
crowd?" The august judge sprang to his feet, 



274 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

and, swinging his hat in the air with a hnzza as 
hearty as the loudest, he cried out, " Three cheers 
for old Scotland ! Nowhere out of Scotland could 
so grand a thing have happened ! " 

Yes, indeed, my lord, everywhere sacrifice to a 
religion of principle is a grand thing. Every- 
where, in Scotland or out, it can be done, and 
nowhere without commanding the ovations of 
lookers-on, friend or foe. Something in the human 
hearts of us all exults in it. Tears of joy come 
in the telling of it. Men not capable of it them- 
selves approve it, trust it, revere it. It is the 
only thing in the shape of religion which they do 
trust under all conditions and at all times. 

Is not this the type of religion which the world 
needs to witness, above all things else, to-day? 
Not only in great exigencies and in sympathizing 
crowds. No, not in these mainly. But in still, 
private life, and in the dull round of individual 
toil. We have religious enthusiasm in great 
assemblies, enough and to spare. We have great 
religious awakenings in abundance, in which the 
numbers of the church swell by myriads. We 
have great religious organizations, societies, insti- 
tutions, in which we glory, and into whose treas- 
uries the wealth of nations flows. Our religion, 
in these developments of its social and literary 
and missionary power, thrives, never more than 
in these times of ours. 

But there is a calm and even flow of religious 



THE MEN IN THE FIRE. 275 

principle in the individual, which underlies all 
these, and which vitalizes them all. That is the 
thing which needs re-enforcernent and revival. 
Does not the world's conversion drag for the want 
of this ? Does not the faith of the world in the 
reality of our religion falter for the want of it ? 
Men look to see religion in the life. They look 
to see Christian merchants carrying their faith to 
their counting-rooms; Christian lawyers, theirs 
before juries ; Christian mechanics, theirs to their 
workshops ; Christian fathers and mothers, theirs 
to their homes, under the honest eyes of children, 
and the silent criticism of . servants. They are 
looking to see Christian leaders of society apply- 
ing their religion to the settlement of questions 
of social caste, and the choice of the churches in 
which they shall worship ; to see Christian minis- 
ters carrying theirs into private life in the selection 
of places of professional labor, in the subordina- 
tion of salaries to usefulness, of dignities to souls, 
of literary tastes to missionary toils, of diplomacy 
to godly sincerity. 

Trades, professions, households, social usages, 
the uses of property, the limits of its increase, 
amusements, schools, travels, — the world is wait- 
ing to see all these Christianized when in Christian 
hands, — Christianized in the sense of being made 
Christie in the principles which govern them. 
It is »looking on to see if ours is a religion which 
costs us any thing. Do we really feel the sacrifice 



276 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

of any one thing for Christ ? Does our life un- 
mistakably and inevitably remind men of Christ's 
life ? Does it probably remind him of it ? Does 
he see in it of the travail of his soul that which 
satisfies him? 

This is the style of questioning by which the 
world is silently putting our religion to the test. 
One revival of a religion of such costly principle, 
pervading individual life, would be worth a thou- 
sand revivals of religious emotion and prayer and 
song, in packed assemblies, if they stop there. 

Yet how easy it is to talk in this strain ! Let 
us who talk it, live it ! One of the early Presby- 
terian ministers of Virginia once said, at the close 
of one of his most pungent sermons of reproof, 
" O my soul, hear thou this word ! for I must 
preach to the one who needs it most." 






THE MAN IN THE LIONS' DEN. 

Then said Daniel unto the king, O king, live forever. My 
God hath sent his angel, and hath shut the lions' mouths, that 
they have not hurt me : forasmuch as before him innocency was 
found in me ; and also before thee, O king, have I done no hurt. 
Then was the king exceeding glad for him, and commanded 
that they should take Daniel up out of the den. So Daniel was 
taken up out of the den ; and no manner of hurt was found upon 
him, because he believed in his God. — Dan. vi. 21-23. 

DO not some of us remember the rude wood- 
cut of "Daniel among the Lions," which 
seemed such a marvel of art to us in our child- 
hood ? We marvelled at the courage of the man 
of God in putting his arm calmly around the neck 
of the lion in the foreground. Would he do it if 
he stood in front, where we did, and saw the grim 
look of the beast face to face ? We doubted. 
That one in the rear, — surely he was creeping up 
like a cat from behind, all ready to spring upon 
his victim. Such is the struggle of faith with 
sight. Angels are nowhere in the comparison with 
lions. 

More than a lifetime of a generation has passed 
with some of us since our faith and our fancy first 
wrestled over the story; yet is it not to-day as 

277 



278 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

fresh as e\ev? Let us see how it reads to our nia- 
turer wisdom. 

1. The story illustrates the fact that God often 
seems to crown the machinations of the wicked against 
the good with success. Dauiel was the victim of a 
conspiracy. His very virtues were the spring of 
the trap laid to catch him in an act of treason. 
His enemies knew their man. They knew that he 
would be true to his religion, come life, come 
death. The plot was adroit. It was executed to 
the letter. To all appearance it was successful. 
When that stone closed over the mouth of that 
den, his enemies had good reason to exult in the 
assurance that they had seen the last of him. 
They slept that night with grim pleasure in their 
dreams, at the thought that beasts were crunching 
his bones. 

Such is sometimes God's way of procedure. He 
gives wicked men full swing. He does not inter- 
fere early in the beginnings of wrong. Not till 
the plot has ripened, the victim been insnared, the 
den opened, and the stone rolled over his head, 
does the angel of rescue step in. Many times 
over has this been the story of persecution. The 
blackest feature in the history of persecutors is 
their fiendish joy at the suffering of other men ; 
and the darkest mystery in God's dealing with 
them is that the malign pleasure which they show 
does not provoke God to destroy them. 

Claverhouse, the persecutor of the Covenanters, 



THE MAN IN THE LIONS' DEN. 279 

used to witness, smiling, the agony of his victims 
in torture by the thumbscrew and the "boots." 
The " Blood Council," in the Netherlands, used to 
celebrate their wholesale executions by midnight 
carousals. One of the persecuting kings of Eng- 
land used to order decapitations to be executed 
before the windows, in sight of his guests at the 
dinner-table. He sought to give a relish to the 
royal dessert by the thud of the executioner's axe. 
He drank to the health of the victim who begged 
for one hour's reprieve. So secure, so free from 
trepidation, so oblivious of an avenging God, have 
wicked men often felt, at the height of their suc- 
cess, in doing the work of devils. 

Time was when the torturing and burning of 
live men was a branch of ordinary and respecta- 
ble business. Men chose it as a trade, and got 
their living out of it. The items of the process 
used to be entered in a ledger, like a grocer's bill. 
Mr. Motley, the historian, quotes the following 
from the old account-book of a Spanish execution- 
er, the original of which he found in the Spanish 
archives : — 

To Jacques Barra, Dr. 

For torturing twice John de Lannoy . 10 sous. 

For executing said Lannoy by fire . . 60 sous. 

For throwing his remains into the river . 8 sous. 

With such diabolical coolness do satanic men 
execute their will upon the friends of God. And 
God lets them do it. Oh, poor John de Lannoy ! 



280 STUDIES OR THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Was there no being in the universe to whom thine 
agony in the fire was worth more than fifty-seven 
cents ? and thy pains on the rack, once and again, 
more than nine cents and a half? 

2. The story of the man in the den illustrates, 
also, the insidiousness of sin in drawing men into 
extremes of guilt ivhich they never 'planned for. 
Darius was personally no enemy to Daniel, The 
prophet was his favorite minister, rather. The king 
was overreached as well as the victim. The con- 
spiracy was so laid as to compel him, from mo- 
tives of state policy, to execute the vindictive law 
against the first statesman of the realm. He 
passed a sleepless night, as many another over- 
reached sinner has done, in unavailing repentance. 

Most truthful is the whole scene to the facts of 
real life. Sin creates sin. Beginning in vanity, 
it ends in remorse. A little rivulet swells to an 
Amazon. A man can never do one wrong thing, 
and with dignity stop there. Factitious laws of 
honor, claims of usage, bonds of habit, hedge him 
around, press him down, and crowd him on to 
deeper crime. Duellists have shed blood murder- 
ously before God and their own consciences, who 
still seemed to themselves to be unwilling mur- 
derers. The most stupendous guilt man ever in- 
curred has come upon him under stress of a 
tyranny of circumstance which he himself invited. 

Such was the sin of Pontius Pilate. Well has 
an old English poet represented him as sunk 



THE MAN IN THE LIONS' DEN. 281 

beneath the waves, with nothing visible but his 
hands, and these washing themselves eternally, 
in vain attempt to cleanse his soul, and exclaim- 
ing, lifting up his head, — 

"I Pilate am: the falsest judge, alas! 
And most unjust, that by unrighteous 
And wicked doom, to Jews despiteous, 
Delivered up the Lord of life, to die! " 

Such is the trap of doom into which sin allures 
its victims. Probably the lost sinner never yet 
lived who planned the end of his career at its 
beginning. " Is thy servant a dog, that he should 
do this thing ? " Yet he did the thing. Yes, he 
was a dog. Penitentiaries are filled with men who 
seem to themselves to have drifted there on the 
resistless tide of little sins swollen into great sins. 
Murderers have swung on scaffolds, who said they 
were victims rather than criminals. Hell is popu- 
lous with such victims. Said Alexander Hamil- 
ton, when dying on the duelling-ground by the 
shot of Aaron Burr, " I die like a fool." So he 
did. It is the way of sin to make men fools. 
The greater the man, the greater the fool. 

3. This story of the man and the lions illus- 
trates, further, the supremacy of duty over intrigue 
in the defence of the right. The great statesman 
of Babylon fell before duplicity and stratagem. 
Yet the work of his defence was not of that sort. 
He did not try to outwit intrigue by intrigue. 



282 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

His was a much more simple and safe procedure. 
He had simply to do right. He said his prayers 
"as he did aforetime." He prayed kneeling, as 
he had always done. He prayed aloud, as had 
been his wont. Three times a day, and with 
windows open, he called on the God of his 
fathers, as his mother had taught him in his 
boyhood. 

A more adroit man would have practised casu- 
istry upon himself. A diplomatic saint would 
have shut his window, drawn a curtain, prayed in 
a whisper, lessened the number of his devotions, 
had some other engagement, if haply he might 
thus have saved his quivering limbs from the 
lions' teeth. Not so this simple child of God. 
He was no Jesuit. He would not save life or 
limb by any Machiavellian policy. Not so much 
as by the lowering of' his voice or the closing of a 
shutter would he seem to fear man more than God. 

Such is the grandeur of duty. A simple thing. 
A child can understand it : a dying man can do it. 
Yet the diplomacy of courts and cabinets, backed 
by the standing armies of the world, is no match 
for it. Lay it down as a first principle of truth, 
that, if a man will take care of the right, God will 
take care of him. In the long-run, and as a 
general rule, there is no such thing as a good 
man's failure. He may suffer : the right deserves 
that sacrifice. He may die : the right is worthy 
of that cost. But he cannot fail. God will look 



THE MAN IN THE LIONS' DEN. 283 

out for that. As a general rule, the drift of 
things, even in this world, is such that good men 
succeed by simply doing right. The weakest 
thing in this world is a stratagem when offset by 
a straightforward act of duty by a live man. On 
the contrary, it will commonly be found that in 
the exceptional case in which a good man does 
fail, his failure is nearly in proportion to the 
extent to which intrigue has entered into his 
plans of procedure. Men of stratagem in God's 
service are not, as a rule, successful men. Men 
of wily conscience are not the men of heaviest 
weight. They are not the men who turn the 
scales of things in crises. They are never safe 
leaders, nor the best men. 

4. I am indebted to one of the most suggestive 
of recent commentators on the text, for the strik- 
ing hint that the story of Daniel illustrates the 
need which human governments often experience, of 
something like an atonement for the violation of law. 
This Eastern despot acted under stress of what he 
deemed the dignity of law. Chaldsean jurispru- 
dence provided no way for what we should call 
the constitutional pardon of a transgressor. Once 
proved guilty, he must suffer, no matter what his 
rank or the palliations of. his crime. It was a 
clear case of conflict between mercy and legal 
justice. 

Other human governments experience the same 
conflict. The great anomaly of human adminis- 



284 STUDIES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

tration of law is the power of pardon. Law, as 
such, knows nothing of it. Be the pressure on 
the side of mercy ever so great, Law says, " Par- 
don ! What is that ? " In modern governments, 
we jump the difficulty by lodging the power of 
pardon somewhere, ignoring law. Yet never is 
that power exercised without loss to the prestige 
of authority. Murderers take courage in crime 
for every murderer who escapes the scaffold. 

Well-known cases have occurred in which the 
benevolent impulses of an entire people were all 
one way, and the necessities of law were all the 
other way ; and benevolence was impotent, and 
law triumphant. 

Such was the conflict between justice and 
mercy, when Major Andre, the British spy, was 
condemned to death by the American court- 
martial. Probably Washington never set his 
hand to a document which cost him a more 
severe struggle than that caused by the death- 
warrant of Andre. But the safety of our young 
Republic would not permit the deed of mercy. 
Its very life hung in a trembling scale. Twenty 
Arnolds might have been the fruit of pardoning 
one Andre. Therefore said the commander-in- 
chief, " He is a spy. By the laws in war, his life 
is forfeit. He must die." And die he did. 

In all such instances, human governments be- 
tray their need of something equivalent to an 
atonement ! something to do for human law what 



THE MAN IN THE LIONS' DEN. 285 

the atonement of Christ does for the laws of God 
in the pardon of the guilty. In that still moment 
in which men hold their breath, in waiting to hear 
the death-sentence from the judge, he bows his 
head, and weeps for some other way of vindicating 
the eternal sacredness of law than by the doom of 
the now trembling offender. Is there no other 
sacrifice, in earth or heaven, which will take its 
place ? What else was the meaning of the tears 
and the faltering voice with which Chief- Justice 
Shaw of Massachusetts pronounced sentence of 
death upon his friend Professor Webster ? 

The argument, therefore, from real life, is to this 
point : Why should not the same necessity be felt 
under the government of God ? Why should we 
believe that the mind of the universe could bear 
without moral anarchy the shock of the wholesale 
pardon of sin, when the mind of man cannot bear 
the shock which law suffers in the pardon of one 
poor, tempted brother-man ? Why should we 
not believe that infinite justice feels the need of 
some device for the protection of its sacredness, 
when a world of criminals goes free ? And why 
should we not believe, on the authority of God's 
word, that infinite wisdom has found it in the 
device of an atonement by the sinless yet dying 
Son of God? 

5. The story of the man in the den suggests yet 
further, that G-ocCs deliverance of the good is often 
hy methods in which the marvellous borders upon the 



286 



STUDIES OE THE OLD TESTAMENT. 



miraculous. The closing of the lion's mouth for 
the safety of the prophet was a miracle. What, 
then, can we learn from this feature of the story ? 
Not that we are to look for miraculous interven- 
tions in our behalf. Not that we are to expect 
angels to come to our rescue from wild beasts and 
wilder men. The principle which governs God's 
interference with the natural and probable course 
of things is this, — that he will do for us what he 
sees, in his infinite insight and foresight, to be 
best, all things considered, and for all persons con- 
cerned ; and that in doing this he often achieves 
results which are as distinctly suggestive of his 
agency as miracles are. In such deliverances, 
devout minds will see God as clearly as if he 
spoke audibly from the heavens, or as if one heard 
the wings of angels rustling in the air. 

The story of the lions in the den recalls in- 
cidents very like it in the experience of African 
travellers. Mungo Park once found himself con- 
fronted by a raging lion, against which he had no 
other available weapon than the look of his eye. 
Yet the beast which had, a moment before, come 
bounding and roaring towards him, stopped sud- 
denly, looked abashed upon the ground, and then 
turned and slunk away. 

Another traveller in African wilds was once 
actually seized by a hungry lion, thrown to the 
ground, and had begun to feel the mysterious 
anaesthesia which the magnetism of wild beasts is 



THE MAN IN THE LIONS' DEN. 287 

said to produce in their victims, when suddenly 
opening his eyes, and fixing them steadily on the 
eye of the beast, he saw that its bloodshot look 
wavered. The soul of the beast recognized the 
soul of its natural lord. He let go his hold on 
the prostrate man, turned with tail between his 
legs, and fled. 

In these cases there was no miracle. But were 
those saved victims idiots in kneeling there on the 
desert, and offering up thanks to an unseen power ? 
Marvel or miracle, it matters little what we call 
it, the agency of God in such events is beyond 
question. Whether he works by a miraculous sus- 
pension of the laws of nature, or by a marvellous 
use of those laws, what matters that ? Sufficient 
is it that he makes himself known to us as a very 
present help in our emergency. 

With such tokens of God's presence, does not 
every human life abound? I know a man who 
believes that he was once wakened by a supernat- 
ural influence from slumber, at the critical moment, 
in time to save his child from his burning dwell- 
ing. One moment more, and it would have been 
too late. Another believes that by an unaccount- 
able impression upon his mind he was turned 
back from a journey to his home, to save his fam- 
ily from nocturnal burglars. Another was so 
beset by providential hinderances as to prevent his 
embarking on board a ship which was never heard 
of after leaving port. President Lincoln believed 



288 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

that he was forewarned of some great catastrophe 
a night or two before his death. The last day of 
his life he spent under the shadow of eternity. 
Who of ns does not know of snch events, which, 
if they were woven into a romance, the world 
would pronounce unnatural, if not absurd ? Yet 
who of us can help believing ? Yes, in every 
human life, truth is stranger than fiction. 

6. The story of Daniel illustrates, finally, the 
fact that the rescue of the good often involves the de- 
struction of the wicked, by a very subtle law which 
may be called the law of retributive re-action. The 
enemies of the prophet-statesman fell when he 
was restored. The scales were held by an even 
and steady hand. When one went up, the other 
went down. Though the revulsion came about 
by the caprice of a despot, yet God used that 
caprice as the motor to the execution of a pro- 
found law which often appears in his adminis- 
tration of the world. Providential retribution, 
upon ungodly nations, occurs largely in the way 
of re-action from the oppression of the good by the 
violence and the machinations of the wicked. The 
destinies of the good and the bad are so bound 
up together, that the salvation of the one. is often 
by necessary sequence the doom of the other. A 
late writer has said that the most characteristic 
thing which this world has to show to other 
worlds is a scaffold on the morning of an exe- 
cution. What for, but for the stress which the 



THE MAN IN THE LIONS' DEN. 289 

security of the innocent lays upon law to afflict 
the guilty ? 

Do we not remember how our childish sense of 
retributive justice responded approvingly to the 
story as it ran : that " the lions had the mastery " 
of those bad men, and "brake all their bones in 
pieces or ever they came to the bottom of the 
den"? We did not know our feeling by any 
high-sounding philosophic title. " Retributive jus- 
tice " we knew nothing about ; but did we not put 
the case to the same purpose in our childish way, 
saying, " It served them right " ? Were we uot 
sensible of a mysterious satisfaction, down deep 
within us, which our unsophisticated conscience 
did not call cruelty ? Children are not by nature 
believers in the doctrine of universal salvation. 

Turn, then, the argument to the mystery of an 
eternal hell. How do we know that the safety of 
the good in eternity, and throughout the universe of 
peopled space, does not involve, by this law of re- 
tributive re-action, the punishment of the wicked ? 
How do we know that heaven and hell are not so 
bound together in the meshes of moral govern- 
ment over free beings, that the one cannot exist 
without the other? 

Sin matured, be it remembered, is no longer the 
silken and polite depravity which for the most 
part it assumes to be in this world. It takes on 
the form of demoniacal hostility to God and to all 
holy beings. Consolidated in that mould of malign 



290 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

character, it voluntarily chooses to remain forever. 
It is energized by spiritual powers of which we in 
the body have no conception. We do not know 
what resources of temptation, of guile, of direct 
assault and resistless conquest, may be inherent 
in the very nature of a lost soul, set free from the 
limitations of a sensuous body. Whatever the 
soul might have been as an heir of heaven, so 
great it must be, perhaps, as an heir of hell. The 
possibilities of spiritual being are the same, meas- 
ured either way. Whatever its resources are, 
the lost soul holds them at the service of eternal 
sin. Heaven has once been thrown into consterna- 
tion by them. Angels kept not their first estate. 
There was war in heaven. Have you ever realized 
in your imagination the possibilities of satanic 
revolution through the universe, involved in that 
one fact of an angelic fall ? 

The practical question, therefore, as it must 
present itself to the diplomacy of infinite wisdom 
in adjusting the government of the universe, is 
this : Shall devils and devilish men be let loose to 
prey upon the objects of their hate-forever? Shall 
heaven itself become hell ? Is there not in all our 
hearts an instinct of upspringing and iron-hearted 
justice which, if the security of the good requires, 
by the law of retributive re-action, the eternal 
confinement of the incorrigibly wicked, says in 
mournful and tender, }^et firm and satisfied re- 
joinder, "Amen and amen"? Did not St. John 



DEN. 291 

hear something like this, when he saw " the smoke 
of torment ascending forever " ? "I heard a great 
voice of much people in heaven saying, Alleluia ! 
For true and righteous are thy judgments. And 
again they said, Alleluia ! And the smoke of her 
torment rose up for ever and ever." 

We are often asked, " How can you bear to be- 
lieve in an eternal hell ? Why does it not craze 
you ? How can you call such a God as can create 
a hell, benevolent ? To us he seems satanic in his 
nature. Yes, your God is my Devil." 

Whenever I go from my home to the city of 
Boston, I pass by a building which reminds me 
of the castle of Giant Despair. It is constructed of 
heavy granite blocks to the very roof. It is sur- 
rounded with lofty granite walls, and these are 
surmounted with iron spikes. I see doors of mas- 
sive iron riveted with iron bolts. I see windows 
barred with iron. Behind those iron bars, I have 
seen pale, despairing human faces, — faces which 
have re-appeared to me in my dreams. I know 
that underneath those walls, in a dungeon cell, 
there lives a man, manacled hand and foot, who 
has clanked his chains there for seventeen years. 
Sometimes more than five hundred of my human 
brothers are locked within those walls of living 
death. 

I have been told that over against a certain win- 
dow there, on the opposite side of the street, there 
lives a pale-faced woman who never smiles. Every 



292 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

morning she places on her window-sill a blooming 
flower, where a certain man behind those bars can 
see it, and can know that a loving woman is think- 
ing of him. Yet I see, in a turret on those walls, 
a man in uniform, with a rifle at his shoulder, who, 
if he sees that brother man trying to clamber over 
the walls, and touch the hand of that loving woman, 
is instructed to shoot him down like a dog. 

Why do I not cry out against the malign power 
which keeps asunder that suffering wife and hus- 
band? Why do I not tramp the streets of Bos- 
ton, pleading with the crowds to go with me, and 
level that Bastille to the ground ? Why do I not 
move heaven and earth against the infernal tyran- 
ny which has devised, and the cold-hearted cruelty 
which tolerates, that granite hell ? What is it that 
sustains my humane sensibilities and yours at the 
sight of such an anomaly of despair, in a world 
where robins are singing in the spring-time, and 
violets are blooming on the hillsides, and little 
children are laughing in their glee ? 

Answer me this, and I will tell you what it is 
that sustains a benevolent universe in beholding, 
and a benignant God in devising, an eternal hell 
for the confinement of eternal guilt. And you 
must prove to me that it is not so, before you 
can charge God with satanic wrong in tolerating 
such a place as hell within the bounds of his 
dominions. 

The question which all such suspicions of God's 



293 



rectitude bring back like a boomerang upon the 
inquirer is, What else shall God do with eternal 
guilt? Shall he forgive it? Shall he, by one 
grand act of amnesty, proclaim liberty to the 
damned, to the Devil, to his angels, and to men 
like them ? But how would that help the matter, 
sin remaining unrepented of and unforsaken? 
Free grace proclaimed in hell forever would not 
quench for one moment its lurid fires, if sin were 
still regnant there. Sin is hell. "Myself am 
hell," says Milton's Satan. Guilt is itself dam- 
nation. Again the question returns therefore : 
" What else shall God do with it? " 

Shall he give repentance, and then forgive ? But 
that is the very thing he has been offering from 
the first. Never will man or devil see the moment 
when he cannot repent if he would. But that 
is the very thing from which the incorrigible sin- 
ner recoils. He will have none of that. Repent- 
ance means submission. Better hell than that. 
Such is the relentless choice of the doomed one. 
Doomed because self-doomed. Doomed by the 
fearful omnipotence of his own free-will. Noth 
ing else which it is in God's power to offer does 
he spurn from him with such concentration of ob- 
durate and vindictive resolve. His whole being 
revolts from it with the intensity, at last, of ages 
of accumulated and malign passion. 

Such is sin : once chosen and implanted and 
indurated in the very nature of man, by a life 



294 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

of abused probation, in which the grace of God 
has been scorned, and the blood of Christ out- 
raged. . Once more, then, the question comes back 
unanswered : " What else shall God do with it ? " 
Through all eternity, that is the question which 
infinite benevolence will ask of an awe-struck yet 
satisfied and adoring universe : " What else shall 
Crod do with it f " 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY IN THE 
CAREER OF CYRUS. 

Now in the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, that the word 
of the Lord spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah might be accom- 
plished, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus, king of Persia, 
that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom, and 
put it also in writing. . . . Thus saith Cyrus, king of Persia, 
All the kingdoms of the earth hath the Lord God of heaven 
given me; and he hath charged me to build him a house in 
Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Who is there among you of all 
his people ? The Lord his God be with him, and let him go 
up. — 2 Celrok. xxxvi. 22, 23. 

AN eminent Jewish scholar once read for his 
entertainment the Gospel of Matthew. As 
he read, his curiosity deepened into a more solemn 
interest. A second time he read it, and his face 
grew pale. The closing scenes in the life of our 
Lord •enchained his attention as never before. 
When he read for the third time of the death and 
burial of Christ, he dashed the book across the 
room, exclaiming with an oath, " Yes, the story is 
true ! . The cursed Nazarene was the Messiah of 
the prophets." The evidence which had con- 
vinced him against his will was the exactness 
with which the biography of Jesus tallied with 

295 



296 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

the prophecy of Isaiah, written seven hundred 
years before. 

The fulfilment of prophecy is one of the two 
supernatural arguments for the truth of the Scrip- 
tures. I can think of no more valuable use which 
I can make of this portion of Holy Scripture than 
to present in some detail the fulfilment of proph- 
ecy in the career and conquests of Cyrus. If my 
young readers will have patience to follow me into 
some of the minute declarations of Isaiah, I think 
they will be rewarded by information which may 
be of lifelong value to them. 

In order to appreciate the comparison of the 
prophecy with the history, it is necessary to ob- 
serve, as a preliminary, that Isaiah wrote not less 
than a hundred and thirty years before Cyrus was 
born, and not less than a hundred and fifty years 
before his conquest of Babylon. It was long 
before the Median kingdom existed. The cap- 
tivity of Judah had not begun. Three or four 
generations lived and died between the prophet 
and the Persian prince. The prophet could not 
possibly have other means of knowing who Cyrus 
was to be, or what he was to do in the world, than 
the simple revelation of the facts by the Spirit of 
God. Yet that he foretold the conqueror's career, 
down to minutest details, is established by precisely 
the same kind and amount of evidence which 
proves that either Cyrus or Isaiah existed at all. 
Bear this in mind as we go on with the story. 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 297 

What, then, does the prophet tell us of the Per- 
sian hero, which history confirms ? The following 
are the most singular coincidences between the 
two: — 

1. The name of Cyrus, the point of the compass 
indicative of his birthplace, and the direction of 
his march upon Babylon, are distinctly foretold. 
" Thus saith the Lord to Cyrus. I have raised up 
one from the north. From the rising of the sun 
— that is, from the east — shall he call upon my 
name." The two points of the compass named in 
this language of Isaiah are singularly true. Cyrus 
was born in Persia, which was east of Babylon. 
It was commonly called " the East." One his- 
torian speaks of it as the " land of the sun-rising." 
But at a very early age Cyrus was removed to 
Media, lying on the north of Babylon ; and it 
was from Media that he came down at the head 
of victorious hosts upon the doomed capital. The 
prophet thus sees in a vision a prince of eastern 
birth, marching upon the city from the north, and 
that his name is Cyrus. 

Small matters these, but all the more significant 
for that. The question is, Who told Isaiah such 
minute details about a man he never saw or heard 
of; coming from a kingdom which at that time 
had no existence ; achieving .a conquest which 
then had not been dreamed of? How did he 
know what name the future conqueror would 
bear, a hundred and thirty years before he had a 
name? 



298 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Did anybody ever predict Bonaparte's conquest 
of Italy a century before his birth? Did ever 
statesman or magician, as far back as A. D. 1650, 
declare, that, a century and a half later, a con- 
queror born in the west of Italy would come down 
from the north, and take possession of Rome, and 
that his name would be Napoleon? Yet this is in 
kind what the Hebrew prophet did. The ques- 
tion is, who told him all that ? How did he alone, 
of all the inhabitants of the world, find out the 
facts so exactly and so minutely? 

2. Isaiah furthermore describes with remarkable 
accuracy the personal character of Cyrus. His war- 
like spirit, his towering ambition, the rapidity of 
his conquests, the equity of his administration, 
and his heathen religion, are all declared, after 
the manner of prophecy. " Calling a ravenous 
bird from the East," is the prophet's language. 
Prophetic vision deals largely in symbols. The 
eagle is its favorite symbol of an aspiring, war- 
like, swift conqueror. " Who raised up the right- 
eous man from the East," is the prophetic descrip- 
tion of Cyrus. It is almost the exact language 
in which historians describe the government of 
the Persian king. " The just one," he is often 
called. " Take example from the Persian," the 
tutors of Oriental princes used to say to their 
royal pupils. " I have girded thee, though thou 
hast not known me," are the words which proph- 
ecy puts into the mouth of God concerning him. 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 299 

This is a distinct prediction of his ignorance of 
the true God. 

These are but a few specimens of the prophetic 
touches of which there are many more, portraying 
with an artist's skill the character of this monarch. 
Imagine now, that, in addition to announcing the 
name and the birthplace of Napoleon a hundred 
and thirty years before he was boim, the magician 
had described him as an eagle in his conquests ; 
had said that he would originate a superior code of 
jurisprudence, — the " Code Napoleon ; " and that 
in his religion he would be a Romanist. Would 
not such hints, added to the items before named, 
redouble the surprise at the magician's power? 
Would not men ask with astonishment who he 
was, where he came from, by whose .authority he 
spoke, and where he got his information? Yet 
this is just what Isaiah declares of the great 
conqueror of the East. 

3. . The significance of the prophecy deepens, 
when it comes to describe the conquests achieved by 
Cyrus. Passages abound of which these are spe- 
cimens: "He gave the nations before him. He 
made him ruler over kings. He made them as 
dust to his sword, and as driven stubble to his 
bow. The isles saw it, and feared : they helped 
every one his neighbor. Every one said to his 
neighbor, Be of good courage. I will subdue 
nations under him. I will loose the loins of 
kings." 



300 STUDIES OF THE OLD TEST ANIENT. 

By such rapid glances, the half of which I do 
not quote, the prophet foretells the victories of 
Cyrus over the great nations of the East ; the con- 
sternation of their kings : their alliances for mu- 
tual defence ; and the velocity with which the 
Persian lesions marched from victorv to victorv. 

Turn we now to history : what has that to say ? 
It does but repeat the prophecy in describing the 
facts as they occurred. Says one, " He had 
scarcely gained one victory, before his tumultuous 
forces poured down on other battle-grounds. 
Scarcely had one city fallen, before he stood thun- 
dering at the gates of another. Empires were 
like dust before him, and cities like chaffy That 
prophecy, " I will loose the loins of kings," had its 
exact fulfilment in the consternation of Belshazzar 
at the handwriting on the wall, when the Persian 
armies were on the march, and within twenty-four 
hours would be heard tramping the streets of the 
doomed capital. 

4. The prophecy of the downfall of Babylon de- 
serves distinct review. The prophetic story runs in 
this style : " Evil shall come upon thee. Thou 
shalt not know from whence it riseth. Thou 
shalt not be able to put it off. Desolation shall 
come suddenly, which thou shalt not know." 
Thus is expressed the sudden, the unexpected, the 
irresistible, and the improbable calamity, which was 
coming upon that haughty city. 

Just such, in fact, was its conquest by Cyrus. 






THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 301 

That event, to begin with, was in itself, and in 
any form, improbable. The military science of 
the age pronounced Babylon impregnable by any 
methods of assault or siege then known. So 
secure did king and people feel that it could not 
be taken by human force or strategy, that, on the 
very night of its capture by Cyrus, they were 
given up to feasting and carousal behind their 
insurmountable walls. The king would not be- 
lieve the rumor of the enemy's entrance, even 
when the blood of his people was flowing in the 
streets. 

Here, again, little incidents are detailed, which 
no soothsayer would have thought of, or would 
have dared to predict if he had thought of them. 
" I will say to the deep, Be dry ; I will dry up 
thy rivers. I will open before him the two-leaved 
gates. The gates shall not be shut." The sig- 
nificance of this language will appear from array- 
ing it side by side with the historic facts. Baby- 
lon was a city fifteen miles square. It was 
intersected by the river Euphrates, as London is 
by the Thames, and Paris by the Seine, and 
Philadelphia by the Schuylkill. Solid walls sur- 
rounded it, three hundred and fifty feet high, and 
broad enough on the top for four chariots to be 
driven abreast. The two sections again were 
separated by walls running along both banks of 
the river. Fronting the streets on either side 
were folding gates for convenience of access to 



302 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

the stream by day, which the police were in- 
structed to close at the setting of the sun. 

Cyrus took the city by a remarkable stratagem. 
In military invention he was a genius. He strik- 
ingly resembled our own Gen. Sherman. In our 
late civil war Gen. Sherman once despatched 
a force to cross a certain river at a given point. 
His subordinates soon came back, saying that 
there was no bridge there, and that the river 
was not forclable for twenty miles. Said the 
general, with flashing eye, "Isn't there a village 
within five miles of there ? " Yes, sir." — " "Well, 
go back, and level every house in that village 
to the ground, and with the timbers build a bridge 
across the river." And they did it. 

Cyrus was the Sherman of ancient warfare. 
His genius invented a novel way of marching his 
army into impregnable Babj'lon. If he could not 
march over the walls, he would contrive to march 
under. He did it by a very simple expedient, 
when once thought of, but only he had the genius 
to think of it. He dug an immense canal around 
the walls, and turned the river Euphrates into it. 
Then he marched his army at dead of night, and 
in dead silence, under the walls, in the vacant bed 
of the river. But this brought him only between 
the two other immense river-walls inside. How 
to surmount these was the question. The indom- 
itable general had provided scaling-ladders for the 
purpose. But the God of Isaiah had done better 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 303 

for him than that. Sure enough, he found those 
gates which let the citizens down to the river in 
the day-time — " two-leaved," that is, folding gates 
— wide open. Like other drunken policemen, the 
custodians of Babylon had neglected to close. those 
gates. 

If my young readers have ever seen the gates 
which are used in the locks of a canal, like those 
of the Erie Canal at Little Falls, they will have 
some idea of the structure of the "two-leaved 
gates " of Babylon, and of the importance to an 
invading army, penned up in the channel of the 
Euphrates, of finding those gates open. Thus 
Cyrus found them. Even the palace-gates were 
not closed. The invader got near enough to hear 
the drunken carousals of the king and his cour- 
tiers inside, before they were convinced of his ap- 
proach. Do you not now see a new meaning in 
the words ? " I will dry up thy rivers ; I will open 
the two-leaved gates; the gates shall not be shut; 
I will loose the loins of kings." 

Herodotus, the ancient historian of the event, 
writing seventy years afterwards, comments upon it 
in this manner : " If the besieged had been aware 
of the designs of Cyrus, they might have destroyed 
his troops. They had only to secure the folding 
gates leading to the river, and to have manned 
the embankments on either side, and they would 
have enclosed the Persians in a trap from which 
they could never have escaped. As it happened, 



304 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

they were taken by surprise ; and such is the ex- 
tent of the city, that they who lived in the extrem- 
ities were made prisoners before the alarm reached 
the palace." "As it happened." Yes, it hap- 
pened ; but, a hundred and more years before, God 
had said by his prophet how it should happen. 
He had said, " I will open the two-leaved gates." 
So Cyrus found them wide open, and the way 
clear to the very banquet-hall of the palace, just 
as Isaiah had said, before Cyrus was born, that 
they should be. 

Now, suppose that about the time of the Ameri- 
can Revolution, the Rev. Dr. Witherspoon, one of 
the signers of the Declaration of Independence 
from New Jersey, had fallen into a trance. Sup- 
pose that in that trance he had foreseen and de- 
clared that one Sherman would arise in distant 
times, who should go down from the north, and 
march from the west to the seaboard with a con- 
quering army, scattering devastation on his way ; 
that his march would be like the flight of an eagle ; 
that city after city should fall before him ; that 
consternation should fill the hearts of the people, 
and of the governors of States ; and that by that 
march from victory to victory he should aid in 
putting an end to a civil war which threatened the 
existence of the nation, — suppose that in describ- 
ing Sherman's march from Atlanta to Savannah, 
that incident of his building a bridge and crossing 
a river with the timbers of demolished houses 



THE FULFILMENT OF PEOPHECY. 305 

were named in language which could mean noth- 
ing else, — would not the men of our time have 
reason to think Dr. Witherspoon, in his trance, had 
something more than guesswork in his prevision 
of the future ? 

Yet all this would not have been more singular, 
more improbable, more impossible to human view, 
than these predictions of Isaiah respecting the 
march of the Persian monarch to the conquest of 
Babylon. The question therefore returns, laden 
with redoubled significance, Where did' Isaiah get 
his information ? Who told him that Babylon, a 
hundred and fifty years afterwards, would be shut 
off from the Euphrates by gates ? Who told him 
that they would be folding gates ? How did he 
know that a man named Cyrus would enter the 
capital in the bed of the river, and on that partic- 
ular night, contrary to usage and to law, would 
find that the police had left those gates open, as if 
on purpose to let the invader in ? In short, how 
came he to write history a hundred and fifty, years 
beforehand ? Did any other historian ever write 
his history a century and a half before it happened, 
instead of a century and a half later, and be 
lucky enough to have it all happen to be true, 
even down to the structure and the opening of a 
gate? 

5. One other feature of the prophecy and the 
history in parallels remains to be noticed. Isaiah 
explicitly foretells the restoration of Judah from 



306 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

captivity, and the rebuilding of the temple at Jerusa- 
lem, through the agency of Cyrus. God declares 
by the mouth of the prophet : " I will direct all his 
ways ; ... he shall let go my captives." " Even 
saying to Jerusalem, Be built ; and to the temple, 
Thy foundations shall be laid." ..." He shall let 
go my captives, not for price nor reward." " Ye 
shall be redeemed without money." ..." Ye shall 
not go out with haste, nor go by flight." 

Here we find another group of details which no 
uninspired mind could have guessed at, and no 
soothsayer would have dared to predict. Every 
one of them was to the last degree improbable. 
No statesman of the age did conjecture them. In 
the prophet's time, there were no captives at all in 
Babylon from Judah. When they became cap- 
tives, long after, it was improbable that they 
would be released in any way by an Oriental des- 
pot, flushed with victory. They were very valua- 
ble captives. They were of an intelligent race. 
Good servants, able-bodied men and women for 
household use, skilful artisans, honest laborers, 
were abundant among them. Men of learning 
and genius, like Daniel, some of whom were de- 
servedly advanced to high places in the realm, 
were Hebrews. 

Scarcely any other race has the world ever 
found so serviceable as that despised stock of 
Abraham. At the very time when the Spanish In- 
quisition was persecuting the Jewish people to the 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 307 

death, and but one country in Europe was a safe 
asylum for them, many of the most eminent schol- 
ars, scientists, professors, musicians, even states- 
men at the head of empires, were Jews in secret, 
living under assumed Gentile names. And to this 
day they are a race everywhere spoken against, 
but everywhere used. Not a great war can be 
carried on in Europe without the permission of 
a Jew. Bismarck, Andrassy, Gortschakoff, all 
are compelled to ask leave of a Jew before they 
dare to plunge the governments they represent 
into the vast expenditures caused by a great war. 
Lord Beaconsfield of England is himself a Jew. 

So in the Persian economy : never was a more 
valuable class of slaves of equal number held by 
the rights of war than those held under command 
of Cyrus from Judsea. It was the last thing to be 
expected from an Eastern despot, that he should 
let such a people go free ; that he should charge 
no ransom for them ; that they should not be com- 
pelled to take their freedom by force or stratagem ; 
that their master himself should restore to them 
their plundered treasures, and direct the rebuild- 
ing of their desolated temple. Never was a pre- 
diction more improbable on the face of it. 

Yet all these things happened just as Isaiah 
said they would. The truth of the history no 
infidel presumes to question, whatever he may 
think of the prophecy. Imagine now, that a hun- 
dred years ago there had been no Africans in the 



308 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

American colonies of Great Britain. Yet imagine 
that Dr. Witherspoon in his trance had declared 
that the march of one Sherman, the man of eagle 
eye, from the Cumberland to the seacoast, should 
result in the liberation of millions of African 
slaves ; that they should go free suddenly ; that 
not a dollar would be paid for their ransom ; that 
they would not force their liberty by insurrection, 
nor steal it by flight ; that it would be given to 
them outright by the proclamation of the presi- 
dent ; and that in the city of Washington a grand 
university would be erected for their training as 
free citizens of the republic. 

The men of that age might well have laughed 
at ravings so improbable. But what would now 
be the verdict of the men of our age ? Should we 
believe that the story was all guesswork ? Should 
we not believe that supernatural prescience was in 
it? Yet just such in kind was the vision of 
Isaiah, — no less specific in detail, no less consistent 
in the continuity of the story, and no less true to 
fact. Not the half of the coincidences between 
the prophecy and the history are given here. The 
prophecy now all reads like history. The facts of 
the one tally exactly with the prescience of the 
other. 

The question therefore returns again, — How 
did Isaiah get his knowledge of coming events? 
Who told him facts a hundred and more years 
before the wisest statesman of the age had once 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 309 

thought of them as conjectures? Did any other 
man, not inspired of God, ever coin history thus 
out of guesswork? Did ever romance fall true 
like this? Sir Walter Scott wrote historical ro- 
mances. Has " Ivanhoe " or " Quentin Durward " 
ever come true? Toss up a font of alphabetic 
type at random in the air, and will they come 
down all set and ready for the press in the form of 
the " Arabian Nights " ? Yet this is, in substance, 
what infidelity asks us to believe, when it denies 
the gift of divine inspiration to the Hebrew 
prophets. 

Such, then, is the argument from fulfilled proph- 
ecy for the divine origin of the Scriptures. The 
career of Cyrus is but a single sample. Other 
cases of the same kind swell the proof to volumes. 
The present condition of Babylon; the destruc- 
tion of Moab ; the fall of Tyre ; the conquest of 
Egypt ; the doom of Damascus ; the desolation 
of Idumsea ; the sack of Jerusalem ; the life, death, 
and burial of Christ, — are events which belong 
to the same class. They all abound with the same 
sort of coincidence between the prophecy and the 
history. The coincidence extends to minute de- 
tails. It is sustained without a break through 
long-continued narrative, covering years — yes, 
centuries, — and involving the destiny of individu- 
als with the fate of nations and of empires. 

Such intricate and involved prevision no human 
mind could have painted without a break in the 



310 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

truthfulness of the story, unless inspired by an 
omniscient God. Any other solution of the mys- 
tery throws upon us a weight of credulity a hun- 
dred-fold greater than that of faith in the " Ara- 
bian Nights " as authentic history. For the most 
part infidelity feels this, and very shrewdly de- 
cides to let the fulfilled prophecies of the Bible 
alone. There is no other argument for the truth 
of the Christian Scriptures, which infidels so gen- 
erally agree to ignore as this. 

A single admonition is suggested by this rapid 
review. It is, that young minds should guard 
with special care against the beginnings of distrust 
in the divine origin of the Bible. Any young man 
can be an infidel if he wills to be one. The Rev. 
Dr. Emmons was once appealed to by a saucy dis- 
believer in immortality, who said, " Show us the 
evidence of this thing you call a soul : what does 
it look like ? " He replied, turning on his heel, 
"No: I can't prove a soul to a man who hasn't 
any." 

So we cannot prove the divinity of the Bible to 
one who has no will to see it. But in a Christian 
land no man can deny it with an unsullied con- 
science. The evidence is clear ; it is direct ; it is 
abundant. Juries send men to the scaffold on evi- 
dence not the half of it. No man can resist it 
without guilt. No mind can sink so low, without 
approaching near to that state of matured deprav- 
ity in which it calls evil good, and good evil; 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 311 

truth falsehood, and falsehood truth ; in which it 
believes absurdities, and trusts in contradictions, 
just because it stubbornly wills to do so. 

Not the least among the surprises of the day 
of judgment will be the re-discovery of lost truth, 
through the resurrection of rejected evidence. 
Proofs which once men saw as in sunlight, but 
closed their eyes upon, will be again written in 
flaming fire. Eternity will be ablaze with them. 
These ancient Hebrew seers will be there, to bear 
witness to the evidence they left on record of the 
inspiration of God's word. " Fool that I was," 
will then be the verdict of many a lost being, — 
" fool that I was, not to believe what I knew to be 
true!" 

The near approach of death sometimes antici- 
pates the surprises of that day. Ethan Allen of 
Vermont, of Revolutionary fame as the leader of 
the " Green Mountain Boys," was an infidel. His 
wife was a devoted Christian. When he was on 
his death-bed he was asked, " Whose faith do you 
wish your children to adopt, yours or their moth- 
er's ? " — " Their mother's," was the prompt reply. 

A similar incident occurred in the last hours of 
the celebrated Dr. Paulus, professor of biblical 
literature at Heidelberg. He was substantially 
an atheist. He denied every thing supernatural, 
even to the denial of the immortality of the soul. 
When his fatal illness began, he declared that he 
was about to die, and that that would be the end 



812 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

of him. In this cheerless faith he calmly awaited 
the closing scene. When it came, he lay in a 
speechless coma for some hours. It was supposed 
that he would never speak again. But at last he 
suddenly opened his eyes, raised them to the ceil- 
ing, as if he saw something invisible to other than 
dying sight, and starting to raise himself in bed he 
exclaimed, " There is another life ! " then fell back 
a corpse. What an appalling discovery to make 
at the last moment of an abused and lost proba- 
tion ! — that a man's lifelong faith, on which he has 
risked eternity, has been a lie, and that he has 
nothing now but the ruin of a soul to carry into 
another life. Let youthful readers take warning. 
Watch with prayer the first wavering beginning 
of distrust in the word of God. 

It is the word of God. True or false, it is 
inspired by an omniscient mind. If false, it is a 
fraud so stupendous that mortal man could never 
have originated it. The grandeur of the imposture 
would be as miraculous as its truth. A living writer 
has declared that our Lord Jesus Christ was God, 
as he claimed to be, or he was the Devil. With 
unutterable reverence be the hypothesis tolerated 
for the moment. For it is between such extremes 
of best and worst that we have to choose in ac- 
cepting or rejecting the religion of the Bible. 
There is no middle ground on which a reasonable 
man can stand, knowing nothing, believing noth- 
ing, caring nothing. This book is true, or it is a 



THE FULFILMENT OF PROPHECY. 313 

lie so stupendous that human thought never con- 
ceived it; and it comes to us sustained by evi- 
dences which to the common-sense of men must 
prove it to be the work of God. Which is the 
more probable ? On which belief is it safer to risk 
eternity ? 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL 
THOUGHT. 

I saw in the night visions, and, behold, one like the Son of 
man came with the olouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient 
of days, and they brought bim near before him. And there was 
given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, 
nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an 
everlasting dominion which shall not pass away, and his king- 
dom that which shall not be destroyed, — Dan. vii. 13, 14. 

ONE of the first signs by which a traveller in 
Italy observes that he is approaching the 
capital of the kingdom, is that all the guide- 
boards bear its name. From whatever quarter 
of the compass he journeys, and by whatever 
highway, he sees at all corners the outstretched 
finger, and the words, " To Rome." The people 
have a proverb that " all roads lead to Rome." 

Similar to this network of highways is the in- 
ternal structure of the Bible. That, too, is covered 
over by lines of suggestion, which all point one 
way. They converge to one centre, and that 
centre is Christ. A sample of this is found in 
the text before us. 

I. Let us first observe some of the details of 

314 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 315 

biblical truth in which this centring of revelation 
in Christ is seen. 

The first token of it which the reader of the 
Bible discovers is the Old Testament doctrine of 
the Messiah. From afar, back at the epoch of the 
fall, down to the last of the prophetic ages, we 
find the promise of the coming of a mysterious 
being, of miraculous birth and strange destiny. 
His life is to involve strange contradictions. He 
is to retrieve, in some mysterious way, the disaster 
of the fall. He is to engage in victorious conflict 
with the powers of darkness, and set men free 
from their dominion. Who he is, what he is, 
whence he is to come, what is to be his rank, what 
he is to do, how he is to live and how to die, are 
at first only hinted at. The seed of the woman 
shall bruise the head of the serpent. Then with 
increasing clearness comes the promise to Abra- 
ham. Then follow the types of the Mosaic ritual, 
pointing to a distant future, and hinting at an 
atoning tragedy. In the Psalms the great ad- 
vent grows more resplendent : " Lo, I come : in 
the volume of the book it is written of me." 
Finally the prophets pour forth a low and tender 
wail, as if chanting a funeral dirge over the de- 
spised and rejected One, the Man of sorrows; 
him whose visage was marred; in whom is no 
beauty ; who should bear griefs not his own, and 
suffer stripes for others' healing. Then suddenly 
the scene changes, and the chorus swells and 



316 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

deepens into exulting and triumphal song of 
the Wonderful, the Counsellor, the Prince of 
peace, the mighty God, the everlasting Father. 
To a soul inquiring after God, the Old Tes- 
tament seems to fill the air with these mysterious 
responses. 

A German astronomer, not long ago, called my 
attention to the magnificent distances and the 
sublime evolutions of the heavenly bodies. Said 
he, " Up there in the December skies, I can see 
something that seems to me worthy of an almighty 
God. But when I come back from the stars to 
your Old-Testament story about fire coming down 
from the sky to burn up the fragments of a 
slaughtered lamb, it seems to me very petty in 
the contrast. I cannot help asking myself, ' What 
can the God of the sidereal universe have to do 
with that ? '" True, it is very petty till we dis- 
cover in the bleeding lamb, on the altars of Judaea, 
the symbol of the Lamb that was slain from the 
foundation of the world. It is beneath the notice 
of the God of the stars, until we discern in the 
blood of the sacrifice a type of the blood which 
was fore-ordained for the- remission of sin before 
one star glistened in the diadem of night. 

Take Christ out of the Old Testament, and the 
student of astronomy may well scorn and scout 
the whole story. Put back Christ into its pages, 
and they glow with a magnificence which the 
heaven of heavens cannot contain. Petty, is it? 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 317 

That very homeliness of its details is the measure 
of God's condescension. Thus he has come down 
to the slow and patient training of a rude people 
in a ruder age. Is the prattle of the nursery 
degrading to the young mother who fondly studies 
its meaning? What else marks the love of a 
mother like it ? But for just such pettiness, what 
would the world have ever known of Homer and 
Plato? The Old Testament is simply the story 
of the moral nursery of the race. In this one 
fact lies the whole volume of reply to the carpings 
of infidelity. 

The second feature of the Scriptures which 
exalts Christ as their central thought, is the New- 
Testament doctrine of his sufferings and death. 
Here, again, we find the same convergence of radii 
to a centre. Let a philosophical critic, unac- 
quainted with Christian history, read the New 
Testament for the first time, and he cannot fail 
to see that the one central character of the whole 
is Christ. The central fact is the crucifixion. 
The locality of most intense significance is Cal- 
vary. The hero of the " Paradise Lost " is not so 
clearly defined as is the centring of the New- 
Testament thought in the person of Christ, and 
in his tragic death. As patriarch and prophets 
looked forward, so evangelists and apostles look 
backward, to this one mysterious person, and pon- 
der the unfathomable significance of his dying 
words. Here is an event in the world's history, 



318 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

which, in the reach of its meaning, is highei 
than heaven and deeper than hell. Around it 
the New Testament is built. We do not find five, 
three, two, events, from which to select its natural 
centre. There is but one. Every other bends 
to that as a tributary. Take that out of the New 
Testament, and the significance of it is destroyed 
as hopelessly as that of the " Paradise Lost " 
would be if you eliminate the person of Satan. 

A quality like that which science calls " aerial 
perspective " pervades the book, by which the 
light and shade of all other truths are magnified 
or reduced by their nearness or distance of rela- 
tion to this one, — that a man whom other men 
understood to make himself the equal of God 
died an ignominious death on the cross. Even 
the letter of the volume hints at this. St. Mat- 
thew begins with, " The book of the generation 
of Jesus Christ; and St. John ends the vision 
of the Revelation with, " The grace of our Lord 
Jesus Christ be with you." The one image which 
fills tip the whole interval between is Jesus 
Christ. A hungering, thirsting, suffering, pray- 
ing, dying, buried, rising, ascending, interceding, 
reigning, exultant, and triumphant Redeemer, is 
the one burden of the story. 

This concentration of biblical thought in the 
person of Christ is intensified further by the bib- 
lical doctrine of the deity of Christ. About this 
the Bible does not philosophize. It is presented 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 319 

as a simple fact in the biblical disclosure of 
Godhead. The Word was with God, and the 
Word was God. He is the brightness of the 
Father's glory, and the express image of his per- 
son. With such declarations the fact is left in 
its mysterious and sublime simplicity. 

Men often ask us why we make so much of 
Christ in our religious life. Why magnify so 
loftily the name of Jesus ? Was he not a Naza- 
rene? Was he not born of a woman? Was he 
not the son of Joseph ? Did not a carpenter claim 
his filial service? A precocious child, a wise man, 
a teacher, an example, a good man, a martyr, a 
man of mysterious command of supernatural 
forces ; all that is good and great and amiable and 
reverend, if you please : still, was he not a babe 
in Bethlehem? Was he not swathed in a man- 
ger? Did he not hunger? Did he not thirst? 
Did he not slumber ? Did he not weep ? Did he 
not confess his ignorance ? * Did he not die ? Did 
not the grave claim him as its victim? Believe 
him, then, pity him, revere him, trust him, love 
him, obey him, stand in awe before the mystery 
of his being, if you will ; but why worship him ? 
Why pray to him ? Why make so much of him 
as to exalt him to the ineffable and adorable God- 
head ? Why turn away from the forests and the 
oceans and the heavens, which speak so grandly 
of Him who made them, to seek your God in a 
dying man ? 



320 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Our answer is prompt and plain. It is, that in 
this Man of sorrows, this despised, rejected, suffer- 
ing, dying One, we discern a disclosure of God 
of which Nature, in her most magnificent attire, 
can give us not a hint or conjecture. We go to 
Nature with souls burdened by the consciousness 
of sin, and we get nothing from her that speaks 
to our condition. Both the silence and the speech 
of Nature send us away from her in despair. 

What says the speech of Nature ? We ask her 
to give peace to our troubled conscience ; and she 
tells us how old the mountains are, and where are 
the birthplaces of the rivers and the springs of the 
sea. We entreat her to tell us how Ave can obtain 
forgiveness ; and she discourses proudly to us of 
gigantic flora and fauna, the buried races before 
man was. We press the question, "How can 
man be just with God?" and she shows us exult- 
ingly the bones of the mastodon, and guesses 
wisely at the skeleton of the ichthyosaurus. We 
beg to be taught what we must do to be saved ; 
and she turns to her telescope, and measures for 
us exactly the mountains of the moon, and tells 
us that its diameter is two thousand one hundred 
and sixty miles. On bended knees we beseech 
of her to reveal to us who shall deliver us from 
the body of this death ; and she puts a microscope 
into our hands, and asks us to count the teeming 
population of an oak-leaf, and to observe what a 
tempestuous ocean a drop of water is. We re- 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 321 

spond, "Not that, not that; but tell us, oh, tell 
us, before it is too late, how we shall escape the 
damnation of hell ! " And she proceeds with 
arithmetical precision to count for us the four 
thousand facets in the eyes of a house-fly. 

Alas ! what shall we do ? We turn away in 
despair : we go mourning m'any days for the wis- 
dom that shall make us wise unto salvation. The 
depth saith, " It is not with me." The sea saith, 
" It is not in me." 

" It cannot be gotten for gold ; neither shall sil- 
ver be weighed for the price thereof. The gold 
of Ophir, the precious onyx, the sapphire, the 
crystal, cannot equal it. No mention shall be 
made of coral or of pearls. The price of it is 
above rubies. Whence, then, cometh it? and 
where is the place of it ? " We have heard poets 
say that 

"Nature 
Never did desert the child that loved her." 

But we do not find it so. We find that Nature 
does desert one who inquires of her after a God 
who can purify from guilt. To every such inquiry 
we find her dumb. 

When we get nothing from her speech, we inter- 
rogate her silence ; and that we find more pitiless 
than the grave. The silence of the rocks, and 
the silence of the waters, and the silence of the 
skies, all speak to us of Law. They proclaim, as 



322 STUDIES OP THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

the secret policy of God's government, immuta- 
ble, merciless, damning Law. Every hint that the 
silence of Nature gives to a scorpion conscience is 
charged and surcharged with irreversible and end- 
less doom. Interpreted by Nature's silence, the 
worm dieth not. We see, that, if we suffer ship- 
wreck, the waters drown us. If we are hemmed 
in by forest fires, the flames burn us. If we seek 
shelter under a tree from the storms of heaven, 
the lightning strikes us. If we taste a poisonous 
berry in the woods, disease consumes us. If we 
fall asleep amid the fumes of charcoal, we never 
wake again. If we give ourselves to strong drink, 
hell gapes upon us before the time. Above, 
around, below, within us, we find Law, Law, Law, 
— nothing but Law. Our very being is an incar- 
nate Law. We find no hint of such a thing as 
escape from the vengeance of an outraged Law. 
When did ever a law of nature lift a foot, or tread 
more lightly, because a praying man lay prostrate 
under it? Talk to Law of your sins, ask her 
how you can be forgiven, and she laughs at your 
calamity, she mocks when your fear comes. Law, 
therefore, suggests an eternal retribution for eter- 
nal sin. Why not ? If we are crushed and man- 
gled under the avenging tread of Law in this 
world, why not in another ? Who can tell us ? 

Therefore it is that we turn in our emergency 
to seek for some other disclosure of God, if haply 
we may find it. Why may we not believe that 



CHEIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 323 

we have found it in this revelation of God in 
Christ ? Here we find a God who can pardon sin. 
Herein is the love we need, that, while we were 
yet sinners, Christ died, and died for ns. The 
mystery of the God-man, the man-God, does not 
balk us. Sin is itself an anomaly in the moral 
universe. The forgiveness of sin is an anomaly 
at, which angelic wisdom may well stand aghast. 
At the spectacle of sin unpunished, thoughtful 
intelligence, the universe through, may well trem- 
ble for the stability of God's throne. Till now, 
so far as we know, it has been unheard of in the 
history of the intelligent creation. We should 
expect the method of forgiveness to be full of 
mystery inexplicable to finite wisdom. The mys- 
tery of Christ is just like God, in such an anomaly 
of his government. Enough for us is it that it 
meets our case. Here God does speak to our 
condition. He comes down to a level with us. 
He takes our polluted hand within his own. He 
offers to create in us a new heart. What more 
can we ask for? We do not haggle about the 
life-boat that comes to take us from a burning 
wreck because we cannot make a life-boat. We 
do not spurn the hand of the fireman who lifts us 
from a blazing window because we do not see 
how he got there. Suffice it that we can be 
saved. We believe, we trust, we rejoice with joy 
unspeakable. Therefore it is that this thought 
of God in Christ has become so dear to his 



324 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Church. Therefore it is, that, for almost a thou- 
sand years, the Church of every name, and in 
many lands, has been singing the refrain of her 
St. Bernard, — 

" O Jesus, King most wonderful! 
Thou conqueror renowned! 
Thou sweetness most ineffable, 
In whom all joys are found!" 

And therefore it is that the Church of to-day 
sends back her response to the ages, without one 
jot or tittle of abatement from the ancient faith, — 

"My faith looks up to thee, 
Thou Lamb of Calvary." 

The centring of biblical truth in the person 
of Christ receives another, and, if possible, a 
grander illustration, in the biblical doctrine of 
Christ's mediatorial reign. This is the special 
teaching of the text before us. It is but a hint 
of a more resplendent revelation, which runs 
through the whole history of redemption. This 
" Son of man " in the night visions of the prophet 
is he to whom " all power is given in heaven and 
on earth. God has highly exalted him. At his 
name every knee shall bow, of things in heaven, 
and things in earth, and things under the earth." 

We are not alone, then, in the interest we feel 
in Christ. He is the centre of thought also to the 
whole universe of mind. His is the empire of the 
universe. Svmpathy with his work here is felt in 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 325 

distant worlds. Principalities and powers in heav- 
enly places stand in awe-struck study around this 
one spot where the mystery of redemption is un- 
folding. A strange gravitation draws them to 
this one globe above all others in inhabited space. 
Such is the impression which the biblical glimpses 
of other worlds leave upon us. This is known to 
the universe as the "world of the cross." Lost 
spirits know it as the " world of the cross." Min- 
istering angels know it as the " world of the 
cross." We do not know that another such world 
exists within the bounds of creation. If demoni- 
acal alliances are formed against it, to clutch it 
from the hands of its Redeemer, from holy worlds 
come spiritual re-enforcements in innumerable bat- 
talions to its rescue. Dr. Chalmers did no vio- 
lence to the scriptural disclosures of the reign 
of Christ, when he represented the worlds of in- 
visible being as pulsating and growing tremulous 
in sympathy with the conflicts of the cross. In 
the biblical story of redemption our atmosphere 
seems populous with spiritual legions, marching 
and countermarching at the bidding of the Cap- 
tain of our salvation. 

My space will not permit me to do more than to 
mention the fact that the concentration of revealed 
truth in the person of Christ is further indicated 
by the biblical doctrine of the eternal union of our 
Lord with the redeemed in heaven. 

II. Let us now observe some of the practical 



326 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

bearings of this pre-eminence of Christ's person 
and work npon Christian faith and character. 

1. It has an obvious bearing upon the propor- 
tion and perspective of truth in a Christian's 
belief. A religious creed may be made up of 
truths, and yet not be truthful. It may be false 
in its proportions. It may be delusive in its per- 
spective. Some truths may be inflated, other 
truths may be scrimped. The resultant creed 
may be a monstrosity of distortion. Yet, taking 
it in pieces, doctrine by doctrine, it may be that 
not a falsehood is affirmed, and not a truth is 
denied. In the old punishment by torture, life 
was often racked out of the body by the mere 
distortion of thews and sinews, yet not a bone 
was broken. So a system of Christian faith, made 
up of Christian elements alone, may be paralyzed 
as a practical working-power by the sheer loss of 
symmetry, without denying one truth, or affirm- 
ing one falsehood. 

This tendency to dislocation in religious belief 
finds its most effectual corrective in the view we 
have just considered. The first thing necessary 
to the construction of a geometric circle is to fix 
its centre. So in the adjustment of a biblical 
faith, truthfulness of proportion depends on pos- 
session of the right centre. That is presump- 
tively the most truthful faith, therefore, which 
works into the experience of the believer most 
effectually the reality of the person and the work 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 327 

of Christ. The biblical perspective exalts Christ. 
So should the thought of a crucified Saviour be 
the regnant thought in all Christian belief. 

Christ thus enthroned in the believer's faith has 
a marvellous power to rectify speculative vagaries. 
It is difficult for such a believer to go wrong in 
other elements of his faith. He is not easily 
made a slave of crotchets. This single conception 
of God in Christ is charged with a centripetal 
magnetism which holds in obedient circuit around 
it all other truths, as the sun holds the planets. 
Let this one truth become regnant in the soul, 
and all other truths fall into rank around it, and 
turn inward towards it, as metallic particles do 
when a magnet approaches them. The cross, the 
cross, the cross, — this is the burden of inspired 
wisdom, this is the creative and corrective force 
in all Christian theory of doctrine. 

2. The centring of truth in the person of 
Christ should, furthermore, impart to Christian 
experience a profound sense of the reality of God 
as a personal friend. God in Christ is brought 
home to the believer in these two aspects of his 
being, — as a living person, and as a present friend. 
In redemption we have to do, not so much with 
a device of government, as with a personal Re- 
deemer. Divines talk much of the plan of salva- 
tion. Believers speak rather of the living One, 
the chief among ten thousand. The object of 
redeeming love is not man, but men ; not the 



328 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

race, but the man, the woman, the child. The 
race, as distinct from the individual souls who 
compose the race, is a fiction of the schools. An 
intense personality characterizes the whole trans- 
action by which the sinner becomes a child of 
God. A personal Redeemer reaches forth, and 
takes to himself the personal believer. 

Our hymnology often penetrates our theology 
more profoundly than our creeds can. Hence it 
is that our choicest hymns of praise, those which 
the Church seizes upon by intuition, and learns 
quickly by heart, are many of them founded on 
this sense of the personal possession of a personal 
Saviour. 

3. Another effect of the pre-eminence of Christ 
in Christian faith should naturally be to render the 
friends of Christ objects of personal and profound 
affection. Profound affinity between the followers 
of Christ is an inevitable sequence from profound 
faith in him as the centre of all faith. It is the 
instinct of a redeemed sinner to grasp the hand 
of every other redeemed sinner. To identify him- 
self with Christ's Church; to be known as one 
on whom rest the vows of Christ ; to be called by 
the name of Christ ; to make the interests of 
Christ's friends his own interests ; to be loyal to 
the Christian brotherhood, as to kindred blood, — 
these are spontaneous impulses to a child of God. 
Christians are his friends simply because they are 
Christ's friends. 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OP BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 329 

This experience is not cautiously reasoned out : 
it is involuntary. A child of God no more asks 
whether it is reasonable than he asks whether 
it is reasonable to breathe. Spontaneously he 
says, "Wherever I see a fellow-sinner clinging 
to the cross of Christ, there I behold my father, 
my mother, my brother, my sister. They may 
be my inferiors in wealth, in culture, in social 
rank : still they are my kindred. They may be 
of a weaker race, and of a despised complexion. 
The weight of the world's scorn, which centuries 
have accumulated, may be upon them. Still they 
are my kinsmen. They have been bought with a 
price, as I have been. My salvation is of no more 
value than theirs. It has cost no more : it is 
worth no more. I fill no larger space in the 
universe, as Christ regards it, any more than I 
shall fill a more gorgeous grave, or moulder back 
to dust in more magnificent or beautiful decay. 
Oh, no, no ! The thing which distinguishes us 
all is, that Christ has chosen us. This it is which 
attracts to us the wondering gaze of spectators in 
distant worlds. This it is which surrounds us 
with a great cloud of witnesses. This is the 
crown of our glory, — that the Lamb of God has 
died for us, and the blood of sprinkling has been 
shed for us. 

4. It follows, also, from the concentration of 
faith in the person of our Lord, that the chief object 
of a regenerated life should be the object for which 



330 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

Christ lived and died. The genius of Christian 
living in this world is not mere philanthropy. It 
looks beyond and above the objects of philan- 
thropic reform. It seeks that for which Christ 
died. No Christian life is true to itself which 
is not in this respect one with Christ's life. Phi- 
lanthropy may be very well so far as it goes, but 
it is not necessarily Christian living. 

The reason why religion and reform so often 
drift asunder is not that religion does not sym- 
pathize with reform, but that reform does not 
sympathize with religion. Reform plants itself on 
the temporal and earthly plane of benevolent 
working, and then claims that religion shall ' come 
down and work with it. Religion can only an- 
swer, "I cannot come down. Mine is the pro- 
founder reach into the heart of human woes; 
mine is the more radical method of their remedy. 
Come thou up, rather, and work with me." The 
object for which Christ lived, the methods of his 
procedure, the spirit of his dying words, — these 
are the model of a Christian manhood to every 
follower of Christ whose eye has not been hood- 
winked in its perceptions of Christian duty and 
of Christian privilege. 

5. The ascendency of Christ in Christian faith 
gives character to a Cliristiaris anticipations of 
heaven. A system of religion may always be 
tested by its theory of the rewards of virtue in 
another life. The old mythologies told what they 



CHEIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 331 

were in the picture of Elysian fields. Islam 
proclaims its nature in its promise of a sensual 
paradise. The Scandinavian faith has its Val- 
halla. The North- American Indian has his happy 
hunting-grounds. Last and least of all, poetry 
and romance disclose their effeminacy in the doc- 
trine of a " spirit land," of which nobody knows 
the character. The Christian heaven is distin- 
guished from them all by this one peculiarity, — 
that Christ is there. There as here, Christ is the 
centre of holy thought. Heaven needs no sun 
or moon : the Lamb is the light thereof. 

The single idea of meeting Christ, therefore, is 
the chief thing that makes heaven attractive to 
Christian hope. This it is that makes heaven our 
home. We are not qualified to go there till this 
thought does make it homelike to us. It is not 
the hope of happiness as such. It is not the 
thought of meeting patriarchs and prophets and 
apostles. It is not the hope of becoming the 
companions of heroic men who have suffered for 
the truth. It is not the prospect of sitting at the 
feet of Christian scholars, who may be still pur- 
suing the researches in which they once fascinated 
us here. It is not the anticipation of meeting our 
favorite characters in history; the authors who 
have instructed us ; the poets who have charmed 
us ; the statesmen who have roused us to patriotic 
deeds ; the preachers who have moved us by 
words which we expect to remember there; the 



332 STUDIES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT. 

writers of our favorite hymns, which we hope to 
have sung to us on our death-beds; men and 
women of the past, for whose creation we shall 
thank God forever, — it is not chiefly the hope 
of meeting this noble company that renders 
heaven attractive to Christian faith. 

Nor is it the dearer hope of meeting our kin- 
dred there, of breaking the long silence of their 
graves, and hearing again loved voices, and seeing 
loved faces, and grasping loving hands again. 
No : not this is the central and regnant thought 
of heaven, when we seem to draw nearest to it, 
and to catch the reflection of its radiance on the 
hills, or to hear the echo of its strains in the 
midnight air. The thought which then entrances 
us is simply that Christ is there. " I shall see 
Christ. These eyes shall behold him. I, and not 
another. I shall be fitted to look upon him with- 
out shame. I shall be so changed that I can bear 
the look of his pure eye. I shall be able to stand 
erect in his presence. I shall have a crown to 
cast at his feet. He will own me as his friend. 
I shall reign with him. What that may mean, 
I do not know, but he knows, and that suffices. I 
shall be satisfied when I awake." 

Such has been the thought of confessors of our 
faith in all ages, as they drew near the confines 
of that world. Martyrs, from St. Stephen down- 
ward, have rejoiced in this vision. When one of 
the most learned of the archbishops of England 



CHRIST THE CENTRE OF BIBLICAL THOUGHT. 333 

was on his death-bed, and friends sought to com- 
fort him by a review of his great and noble life, 
said he, " Tell me not now of what I have done, 
or of what I have been. Tell me of Jesus Christ. 
I am going to meet him, my Lord and my God." 
Another of England's sainted ones, well known 
in her annals of Christian martyrdom, when the 
flames wreathed themselves around his form, 
seemed to see heaven opened ; and he could tell 
what he saw there only in words of rapture: 
" None but Christ ! none but Christ ! " 



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